We're working on a better homepage right now, but it's taking a while because we kinda (really) suck at design.
I agree that the click to reserve ux is bad. But I think it's also a thing you only need to learn once, then you'll know stuff is in the sidebar. Taking up the whole page is pretty strange because nothing else does that at the moment, but this might change. For now, we'll add some hints to direct you to the sidebar when you click on one of those available tiles.
If you're a web developer, backbone.js will teach you how to make gui apps!
I've been working with MVC style frameworks for quite a while on the server-side but until backbone I've never been able to get my head around how to create a gui app using MVC. It was never clear where and how to put things and before I knew it, everything would go spaghetti on me.
I've done lots of js and lots of js intensive apps and I always hated it because of all the lack of structure and mix of concerns everywhere.
For the last two months, I've been using backbone.js, underscore.js, jammit and coffeescript (which is also made by jashkenas) in a quite complex app. Because of them I was able to massively rework things based on changing requirements without ending up with dead code, or strange pieces that are somehow working but not really needed.
I can't say this enough. Backbone.js really helped put order in my code and it was so easy to pick up that I am convinced you're really hurting yourself by not using it. The documentation is amazingly well done and has real examples of how you'd use the code, instead of just being generated from arguments and other relatively unimportant stuff.
Thanks jashkenas and samuelclay! And congrats on finally launching documentcloud.org. Keep kicking ass!
I'd really love to hear if you have some ideas about uncluttering it. We've iterated lots of versions till we got to this state.
The canvas drawing confusion seems to be quite spread. We'll definitely have to add something about it.
Oh wow, that's but is nasty.
Let me explain why you got that, you'll find it hard to believe, I promise :)
We use an iframe to upload the tiles directly to s3 and s3 redirects back to the site on success. However, in firefox 3.6, if you refresh the page with such an iframe present, it'll reload the last iframe src, even if the src is now about:blank, because you've just reloaded the page. So, in effect it'll hit the "tile just uploaded" page again. Which is a completely stupid thing to do.
Therefore, when we receive one of the s3 uploads, we also redirect to a page which expresses how we feel.
You might ask yourself why you saw it at sign out. Because we're idiots and the code that remembers the last page you saw to be able to redirect correctly after sign in/sign out remembers this request.
So, I'm guessing that you uploaded a tile, then hit signout immediately, amirighte?
We already did the user testing with 3 people. It was painful to watch, sigh. But that was two iterations away and we learned a lot since. Or so we thought.
Were you expecting to actually draw something while being on the site? This seems to be a common gotcha and thing we don't explain well yet.
Maybe we should make it clear that tzigla is not actually an editor. Or maybe we should just plug one in.
Sorry, I forgot to mention. For some strange reason, I'm not looking to make money out of this. At some point I was considering it, but decided that just making people happy and having a fun project to play with is good enough for now.
Thanks for the advice tho. Most of it applies even if I'm not looking to monetize in some way.
I didn't know about reddit.com/art (and i actually looked for it about the time I posted to hn)
Already found some of community but they all seem to have jobs now so response was kinda non-existent or encouraging and then silence. I'm starting to think I should get more pushy and have less... shame in doing so.
We're working on a better homepage right now, but it's taking a while because we kinda (really) suck at design.
I agree that the click to reserve ux is bad. But I think it's also a thing you only need to learn once, then you'll know stuff is in the sidebar. Taking up the whole page is pretty strange because nothing else does that at the moment, but this might change. For now, we'll add some hints to direct you to the sidebar when you click on one of those available tiles.