ZoomRead follow-up

zoomread.com

2 points·daviding··3 comments

This is a follow-up to a post I did about 3 weeks ago for my site http://www.ZoomRead.com. HN gave a lot of really good feedback and I appreciate it:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1726256

The main message was that the various ways of moving around and 'zooming' (of course) needed to be smoother. For that I've taken a look at the Silverlight 'DeepZoom' (seadragon) API - and so far it's worked quite well.

I'm currently working on 'falling back' to the AJAX client if Silverlight isn't chosen to be used, and will see if I can make it a little faster too.

Thanks again for the feedback from before, and do let me know how this version works out for you. It's been fun working on it.

Cool.

Starting the page zoomed in to an instruction page is helpful, but consider beginning the app zoomed out and set the double-click to zoom. You could provide instructions as a pop-up div.

A new user to the page could then see all of the categories and, if the user has never encountered DeepZoom, a cool surprise.

Again, nice app!

Thanks! Yes, it would be easy to do that. There are 'hover' buttons on the bottom right with a 'home' icon, but I need to bring them out a bit more, i.e. a bit dull in those noisy screen previews.

I was wondering about using a temp cookie and doing a bit of an automated tour, i.e. start at the top, and then wait for a second, then down to instructions. Not sure how good/annoying that would be though...

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