User talk:Magnus Manske/wikipic

Some interim feedback: I like it, quite a bit! But I'd really like to find a way to make images bigger (take up the full available screen real estate) in slideshow mode, with just the minimum necessary info shown.--Eloquence 23:30, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Added full-screen button. Not perfect yet, but getting there. I won't have time after today until the 10th, sadly. --Magnus Manske 21:36, 4 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks! Would suggest integrating the full-screen button into the slideshow dialog itself, and keeping the hover selection lean.

Right now, the full-screen view seems a bit odd -- it shows the enlarged image at the bottom of the screen while still showing part of the content area, and makes it very hard to control what's going on. I'd suggest taking over the entire browser window, and having a dynamic overlay for navigation (which initially appears, and disappears quietly if you're just letting the slideshow play -- some PDF viewers behave like that).--Eloquence 01:06, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

That's how it's supposed to work, and does for me in FF8/Mac... Magnus Manske 14:45, 6 November 2011 (UTC)

It works as intended now, I think.

Here are a few additional suggestions to get it on the road to becoming a gadget on WP.

• The biggest issue from a user standpoint that I see is that the image selection for the slideshow is very confusing. If I'm launching a slideshow when mousing over an image, I'm expecting the slideshow to start with that image. Instead I find myself at the beginning of what seems, sometimes, to be a fairly random selection of images (and in some cases, the selection is actually unrelated to the article). I'd suggest that the image selection for related images should be completely different from the image selection for slideshow or fullscreen mode.
  • For related images, the current selection algorithm and behavior is perfect (or at least consistent with user expectations).
  • For slideshow or fullscreen mode, I would suggest building a selection that consists of a) all images on the page, b) any images that are linked from the page by referring directly to a category or gallery on Wikimedia Commons. I would suggest starting the user at the point in the sequence that matches the image that they moused over.
• I still would maintain that fullscreen mode is a function of the viewer, not a function of the image. We can de-clutter the UI by removing the fullscreen button from the image mouseover, and integrating it in the viewer.
• For fullscreen mode, I would suggest optimizing for viewer experience by focusing as much as possible on the image, while surfacing metadata and navigational elements when necessary.
  • I would suggest center-aligning the navigational controls in fullscreen mode.
  • I would suggest fading out the navigational controls and the title of the image in fullscreen mode if the user isn't interacting with the page for n seconds, where I'd propose n=4 as an initial experimental value. (Whether textual information should fade out is debatable; an alternative would be to load it into a box overlay and make it [x]-able.)
• Stretch goals:
  • Adding captions/descriptions to fullscreen mode with the same behavior as above.
  • Responding dynamically to browser resizing.

Overall, it's really great work -- thanks much for hacking on this :-) --Eloquence 03:48, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Eloquence. A couple of replies:

• The intent of this challenge, as far as I understood it, is to show the plethora of fine files available on Wiki(p|m)edia projects. From that perspective, showing the image you started the slideshow from does not make sense, as you've already seen it (is only as a thumbnail). That said, from a user perspective, it would probably make sense. I did the "info" mode as a workaround, in case the user wants to see something about that very image. In summary, making the "origin image" the first one is technically trivial, it just doesn't feel right with the challenge description somehow.
• For the same reason, I am not enforcing the use of the other images on the page, as the user has probably seen them as thumbnails. Again, implementing this would be trivial.
• I'll think about moving the fullscreen button to the slideshow dialog. Then again, maybe move the slideshow button to the fullscreen mode, and use only that in the hoverbox? Or activate the descriptions in fullscreen mode and get rid of slideshow mode entirely? This clearly needs more thought!
• I kept the fullscreen controls where they are, as to not overlap the image more than neccessary. But, I added a fading effect; text and buttons will "un-fade" when the mouse is moved, and start to fade again after a while, unless the mouse is over the controls.

--Magnus Manske 11:25, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Update: I have made fullscreen the default option, reusing the "normal" slideshow icon. Fullscreen now also shows text, which can be deactivated during the show. --Magnus Manske 20:55, 11 November 2011 (UTC)