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In case you missed it, watch the Xbox One recap here
Xbox One not backwards compatible with 360 games
Morning Discussion
by Alice O'Connor, Feb 18, 2011 5:00am PSTI would very much like to tell you something about video games this morning but the truth is that I'm far too excited to concentrate. Tomorrow evening I'll be seeing the truly wonderful and dreadful Troll 2 along with a documentary about it, Best Worst Movie. I'm a sucker for enjoyably bad movies, especially bad horror movies, and oh my gooooooooooooooood Troll 2 is fantastically bad.
But video games are real, they do exist, and they are happening, so let's get onto those, yes? I hear they have buttons and everything nowadays.
Happy Friday Shack. Quite a lively thread yesterday in response to my post about the impending Shackpocalypse. Thanks to all for the generally high level of discussion and for many good suggestions. The two big requests from the Shack were 1) to find some way to keep Shackpics and 2) to bring back profile pages. We're discussing Shackpics internally to see if we can find some solution given that we aren't going to support it in the new infrastructure. As for profile pages, they have been on the post-launch roadmap all along, so maybe know they move to higher priority.
Since you've been so well behaved, here's some more candy. A sample article page: http://www.shackpics.com/files/NewsHubShacknews_tn5aha6nhjri68pod7r7.png and here is Chatty with Haiku's styling: http://www.shackpics.com/files/LatestChattyShacknews_wf60d8ukalglz576qiz7.png . Code tweaks ongoing.
Stay tuned.
ECO
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* Do you really need Digg, Like, and Tweet buttons on the preview for an article? Shouldn't you offer them up to people after they've had a chance to read the content? I know it discourages clicks in a way, but at the same time it doesn't look quite as shameless ; )
* Is the article title a link? If so bold black text is not a very good way to demonstrate that. I don't know if there's hover effects on it, but even if there is, you're using 3 separate link colors in a single post view. That's not only visually awkward, but confusing to the end user.
* Can we get some sort of backing for that "highlighted" large image, it looks awkwardly placed there without a border or framing (as do the smaller ones).
* The comment bubbles are really generic. Is there something you can do to spruce them up a bit?
* The drop-shadow separator between articles is really bland. It doesn't create a good sense of separation and it's awkwardly sized. Specifically the whitespace between the top of the line, and the bottom of the drop shadow are not equal. It doesn't extend onto the edges of the parent div either, which makes it look awkward.
* The secondary navigation is ... weird. I don't mind the web 2.0 peeled edges, but if you're going to leave that there, may i suggest doing something other than a simple gradient? Add some blue accents and maybe a hint of the stripes you see at the top of the page header. Or, perhaps, given that it's a seconday navigation add a background image on the right that identifies (iconically) which subsection you're at (paper for news, joystick for games, poloroid for media etc. etc.)
* I would ditch the Subscribe to our RSS feed text. Not only is it uncesseary, but it's framed very awkwardly.
* In the interesting comments sidebar, do you really need the "in" line? I would remove that to give it better use of space. Also unsure of the space you have to work with, but i would increase the padding for all of the sidebar content. 5 pixels doesn't look like enough.
* The header is mostly fine, I like the site artistic direction that points to -- but the rest of the site really doesn't match.
* Why not use some more advanced CSS features to get those text links to closely resemble the embossed Shack News text. Granted it won't degrade, but for those of us (i don't know the stats, but i assume they're high for here) that use modern browsers can see some more visual flare.
* Join us text should align with the left hand side of the search box.
* that last nav link should have a seperation line on the right distinguishing it between the login area and the search box area.
There's more, and obviously the image is cut off on the left and the right, but overall this new design really isn't very well done. It looks more like a middle-stage design than a final one to me, it hasn't quite found it's "feel" yet. Just my 2 cents. Chatty looks fine.
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