2013-11-30

Button Labels

On the New UI I use graphical labels for some of the buttons - a magnifying glass for search, a question mark for help, a gear for settings, and a house for "home". Those are all pretty universal iconography for the Web at this point, and there are tooltips for accessibility.

I'm using textual labels for three buttons:

  • Legend - this is pretty unique to this site, and I can't think of a universally understandable icon. I'm pondering whether Legend deserves to be a top level item or should be under "?". I also hide Legend on small screens.
  • Important - this is a "default" search for important worlds.  Again, no universal icon for this concept. I believe this feature will evolve into more of a "browsable, sharable sets of points of interest". Maybe a point-of-interest icon, then?
  • Share - this one is starting to shake out as a standard icon - the three circles in a < formation - but it's not quite universal yet.
Thoughts?

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Nothing to see here, I hope...

I've rejiggered a bunch of the internal workings of the site in ways that are only of interest to developers. The last 40 or so revisions moved away from serving data and images using "ASPX" pages to HttpHandler. Ideally, there's no change in behavior except that unnecessary cruft isn't running. The best part from a developer perspective is that all URL handling for the services is now done programmatically - no hosted files are necessary to add APIs, just code. The code for that lives in the Global.asax.cs file, if you're curious. As an added bonus, I'm using regular expressions for URL dispatching so it's easier to e.g. distinguish /data/sector/subsector from /data/sector/hex and more possibilities are now available - I should be able to enable named subsector references, for example.

Since there are third party sites and services using the old "aspx" APIs I've carefully added aliases to allow those to continue to work. If you're using them, please try and migrate to the new APIs (/api/...) ASAP.

And of course, if I broke anything, please let me know. I fixed one bug along the way - JumpMaps were not correctly eliding out-sector borders. I can't believe no-one told me about that!




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2013-11-18

New UI Design

I've redesigned the UI for the main map page. Please try it out:

http://travellermap.com/new.html

I've tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 8/9/10, and on iPhone and iPad - yes, you now have full UI control on touch-based devices.

Please let me know if you have any issues with the page. If you notice any glitches, it'd be nice if you check with the "classic" page as well to see if you've discovered a long-standing bug or something new with the UI.

Let's shake those bugs out!

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