FA Sidebar (now with filters)

[Fennex]

the text below was for the first version of the sidebar. For info on the latest version, continue to this post.


Every day on FA is yet another battle with the tooltips. When you need them they disappear of the screen, and when you don't need them they're in your way. And on those rare moments you're not battling the tooltips you're peering at the screen with a telescope in a vain attempt to figure out what's going on in those ridiculously small thumbnails. And maybe, just maybe, if you're one of those lucky few who are stuck with a small monitor and FA won't even fit on your screen.

Okay, okay. I jest. But it can't be denied that FA has some minor annoyances. Obviously I had to try and fix them. (You've got to waste your time somehow :lol

The result: Because a picture says more then a thousand words

Features in a nutshell:
Tooltips in a sidebar: Rather self explanatory. Sidebar can be resized and hidden
Big thumbnails toggle: Big thumbnails in the gallery. (For those people with ungodly huge monitors)
Reflow mode: Forces gallery pages to fit on your monitor. (For those people with smaller monitors that want big thumbnails anyway)

Where to get it:
Firefox extension
Greasemonkey script

Not a Firefox user:
Better luck next time :wink:

Bugs, feature requests, hate mail,...:
This thread or thefennex@gmail.com

 

[yak]

RE: FA Sidebar

Every day on FA is yet another battle with the tooltips. When you need them they disappear of the screen, and when you don't need them they're in your way.

The result: Because a picture says more then a thousand words

Though from your screenshot i see that you've been using beta for your development, i will still mention that the tooltip behavior was changed there. They are no longer obtrusive, appearing only on demand and are properly being positioned even at the edges of the screen.

Are there any other issues you see with them?

 

[Rhainor]

RE: FA Sidebar

Say what, Yak? Looking at the Beta-site myself, once I click to activate the "tooltip", it acts *almost* just like it does on the mainsite.

 

[yak]

RE: FA Sidebar

Weren't they supposed to? The only thing changed was

1. You have to click to see them
2. They no longer scroll off screen
3. When you move the mouse for ore then 10 pixels in any direction, they disappear.
4. That's it.

Thus, they are no longer in the way and do not disappear off screen
Oh, and there's always a chance that you're viewing the site with cached javascripts, and do not see the changes.


I'm all for suggestions, so if any of you have better ideas, you're welcomed to share them.

 

[robomilk]

RE: FA Sidebar

Now that's actually quite funky!

A couple of criticisms however. A majority of the icons on the front page don't show up. And the fact that the bar appears and disappears on certain pages ruins the fluency of the page design alterations.

EDIT: About the frontpage, there are no thumbnails for all flash, music, story and poetry submissions. And all 4 of the sections ("Submissions", "Stories", "Poetry", "Music") have thumbnails (or lack of) in the Submissions section.

 

[Chomperz]

RE: FA Sidebar

Two things:

I cannot get the side bar at all on the Control panel, and:

http://i151.photobucket.com/albums/s125/ilrzil/desu.jpg

The white font color does not go well with the background on the regular theme.


But other than that, this is pretty cool.

 

[Fennex]

RE: FA Sidebar

@Yak:
Tooltip behavior on the beta is a lot better. The only way I see this could still be improved is by using a timeout on the span to make the tooltip appear (so the really lazy people don't have to click), but that would be a lot of extra work for little to no added value.



on to the bugs then...

sidebar disappearing:
It wasn't shown on pages that didn't have any tooltips. I've changed it now to show the sidebar regardless of tooltips.

no thumbnails for music, poetry, stories:
The script tried to replace the small thumbs with big thumbs (they obviously don't exist for non-image submissions). That's fixed now.

white font with regular color scheme:
Assigned the wrong class to the sidebar. Fixed now. Many thanks for the old stylesheet Chomperz. That was really useful.

front page screwed up:
Current reflow code doesn't handle submissions across multiple tables very well. Give me a couple days and I'll have that fixed as well.

reflow mode not working on edit/delete submissions:
Can't be fixed I'm afraid. (Unless some friendly neighborhood Yak would be so kind to add class="thumbnail" in the appropriate places, Wink-wink, nudge-nudge)

 

[robomilk]

RE: FA Sidebar

Ahh! Nice fixes! Thanks again for the amazing script!

 

[Chomperz]

RE: FA Sidebar

Word, the fixes work well.

maybe in the next release, you should have a set-width definition for Pic-preview tooltips. It's not a real problem, but, just something to think about..

 

[Fennex]

RE: FA Sidebar

New version.

most notable bug fixes:
- weirdness when changing settings across multiple windows/tabs
- various sidebar width bugs
- no thumbnail when big thumbnail of image submission unavailable

new features:
- minor ui redesign
- icons on thumbnail to identify submission type

somewhat hidden features:
- change banner (set fatooltipssidebar.banner to a value between 0 and 14 in about:config)

 

[yak]

RE: FA Sidebar

Unless some friendly neighborhood Yak would be so kind to add.....

Where and what? I don't mind helping out.

 

[Rhainor]

RE: FA Sidebar

Weren't they supposed to? The only thing changed was

1. You have to click to see them
2. They no longer scroll off screen
3. When you move the mouse for ore then 10 pixels in any direction, they disappear.
4. That's it.

Thus, they are no longer in the way and do not disappear off screen
Oh, and there's always a chance that you're viewing the site with cached javascripts, and do not see the changes.


I'm all for suggestions, so if any of you have better ideas, you're welcomed to share them.

I probably should have been clearer. They no longer scroll off the bottom of the screen (which I didn't notice earlier), but (depending on the position of the submission clicked on) they *do* still scroll off the side of the screen.

 

[dave hyena]

RE: FA Sidebar

They don't seem to anymore. When I click on the title of a submission, which is at the right edge of the screen, the infomation box pops up aligned to the left. In opera.

Overall, it's a right fine change and I'd swear pages load quicker. :O

 

[Fennex]

RE: FA Sidebar

Unless some friendly neighborhood Yak would be so kind to add.....

Where and what? I don't mind helping out.

nearly every thumbnail on FA is wrapped into a table with class="thumbnail" making it relatively easy for me to detect them. The only page where this isn't the case is http://www.furaffinity.net/controls/submissions/
Adding that class there would make things a little bit easier for me (and make FA's UI a bit more consistent).


EDIT:

I probably should have been clearer. They no longer scroll off the bottom of the screen (which I didn't notice earlier), but (depending on the position of the submission clicked on) they *do* still scroll off the side of the screen.

Weird. Tooltip orientation is hard coded as far as I can see so this shouldn't be able to happen. (Unless you change the position of the submissions like with my reflow mode)

Something I did notice however is that in IE7 scroll position is ignored (scroll way down the page and tooltips appear at the top)

 

[Rhainor]

RE: FA Sidebar

Well, it's happening nonetheless. It'll shift up if it's near the bottom of the screen, but it ain't shifting left like it apparently should. I just did a Ctrl-F5 refresh on it, and it didn't change.

'Nother, random thing I noticed about the beta-site...the color has reverted to the normal blue style, but it's still showing the April Fool's Day banner. Note that I've currently got the option set to the dark theme in my settings on the mainsite (I've been flipping back and forth since the option became available, trying to decide which I like better).

 

[Fennex]

RE: FA Sidebar

New version again. For this version I have both good news and bad news.

First the bad news:
- The fancy 'auto-apply without needing to reload the page' had to go. It was a massive pain in the ass to maintain.
- Changing settings looks more intimidating than it should.
- I didn't do a lot of testing so there are probably a couple new bugs.

The good news:
- A lot of the semi-hidden settings from the previous version are now available in a fancy options panel.
- Reflow mode now works on the front page, submission management and favorites management. (So it should work everywhere now)
- Resampling of thumbnails so you can get them at exactly the size you want. (this should also fix those rare occasions where FA forgot to do the resizing for the big thumbnails)


And as this is the last stretch before the 1.0 release I've prepped a website as well. (Ignore the front page for now btw. I just wanted to have some fun with web 2.0 clichés)

 

[Fennex]

RE: FA Sidebar

First beta of version 1.0 released
I would really appreciate it if some people would like to help out with bug-hunting.

new screenshot

Rest of post copy and posted from my journal:

What is it?
It's a greasemonkey script that fixes a whole truckload of minor annoyances and inconsistencies on some FA pages, and does a complete renovation of some other pages.

Greasemonkey?

Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension that allows you to customize the way webpages look and function.

Why?
Because I got annoyed with the state of the website. Then I thought that maybe more people could benefit from my solution.

For who?
People with Firefox 2.0 or higher that have some extra time on their hands they don't know what do to with, would like to help me, and won't freak out when they encounter a bug.

Features
- thumbnails in any size you want
- wraps thumbnails so they don't stretch your browser window
- filters
- tooltips in a sidebar
- redesigned inbox
- ...
All of these features are optional and can be disabled at will.

Obligatory warning
This is a beta version. While I have tried to make it as stable as possible, bugs can and will come up. Even though this script shouldn't be able to crash your browser, it may do so nevertheless. And finally, please don't hold me liable for any data loss that may occur on your end because I can not afford a lawyer.

Where to get it
direct install link (greasemonkey must be installed)
the website (go for 1.0 beta 1)

And that concludes my wall of text for today.
Any and all questions and comments more than welcome.

 

[imnohbody]

You want bug/comment stuff in here, or PM? I've already found an issue or two to ask about.

 

[Fennex]

Either way is fine really. Though posting it in here might save people from having to ask about stuff that has already been answered.

 

[imnohbody]

Ok, in no particular order:

1) I noticed that there are two "Control Panel" links, pointing to the same place, right below the submission notice thingy in the upper right corner. Doesn't seem to be breaking anything (both work as they should), but it does seem a little silly.

2) The inbox handling thing seems a little off. Clicking the "mark as read" button beneath each submission takes the submission away, but doesn't update the notification count until clicking the "apply changes" button. Intentional functionality, or a possible problem?

Firefox 2.0.0.6 on XP Pro, for the record.

 

[Fennex]

1) I noticed that there are two "Control Panel" links, pointing to the same place, right below the submission notice thingy in the upper right corner. Doesn't seem to be breaking anything (both work as they should), but it does seem a little silly.

I'm afraid I'm not following you there. Could you provide a screenshot?

2) The inbox handling thing seems a little off. Clicking the "mark as read" button beneath each submission takes the submission away, but doesn't update the notification count until clicking the "apply changes" button. Intentional functionality, or a possible problem?

You're right, the redesigned inbox is not as clear as it could be and the notification count should be updated. I'm making some changes in that area now.

And If you don't mind me asking a question myself, what did you think of the overall user friendliness? With me being so close to the project, knowing all the ins and outs of the script, that can be kind of hard to judge for me from time to time.

 

[imnohbody]

1) I noticed that there are two "Control Panel" links, pointing to the same place, right below the submission notice thingy in the upper right corner. Doesn't seem to be breaking anything (both work as they should), but it does seem a little silly.

I'm afraid I'm not following you there. Could you provide a screenshot?

Sure. See attachment.

2) The inbox handling thing seems a little off. Clicking the "mark as read" button beneath each submission takes the submission away, but doesn't update the notification count until clicking the "apply changes" button. Intentional functionality, or a possible problem?

You're right, the redesigned inbox is not as clear as it could be and the notification count should be updated. I'm making some changes in that area now.

And If you don't mind me asking a question myself, what did you think of the overall user friendliness? With me being so close to the project, knowing all the ins and outs of the script, that can be kind of hard to judge for me from time to time.

I haven't yet come to a real conclusion, but I'm generally leaning towards liking it. In a day or two I should have some more concrete input on the issue of user friendliness.

(But not right now, I'm like 2 hours overdue for bed, before work tonight. )

 

[Fennex]

Ah, I see now. Let me guess, this only happens when you have no new messages? If so then I think I've just fixed it.

 

[WolfoxOkamichan]

I can't seem to get the extensions. =S

 

[Rhainor]

I can't seem to get the extensions. =S

Greasemonkey extension for Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748

Install that, restart Firefox (it'll ask you to after installing Greasemonkey), then install the FA Sidebar script from this thread.