Airbum – A simple and elegant online album | Hacker News Reader

Airbum – A simple and elegant online album

airbum.co

46 pointshuchenme46 comments

The design is great and this is a really nice way to display a travel album, but the experience is not there. I'm sure when testing over a local network this is fast but even over my 30mbps connection I had to wait a long time for all of the images to load. That's not normally a problem but the page seemed totally 'frozen' until about half of the pictures had loaded, and scrolling was full of jank until it was totally loaded.

Is there some way you could put placeholders in for the images while they load so that I can scroll around? If I wasn't waiting to see the demo specifically I would have assumed the page was broken and clicked out.

I'm having the same issue. The images are taking a very long time to load which freezes scrolling (although I can still hover over the pips on the side). I don't know if the problems are due to HN's load or a weak server.

Either way, I really like the concept.

I think pretty much the same. I really like the design but the scroll sensation plus loading times on fetching is killing it.

As habosa suggests, use placeholders. Also you could prefetch images two scrolls away instead of one.

Another thing that i noticed is that right side navigation circles are linked to "chapter titles" instead of every page. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. It's a bit confusing.

Again, nice design, polish it.

The site is hosted on S3 and cloudfront right now. The poor performance might be because the page transaction and animations. My initial vision is display the album similar to a photo book, now seems nature scrolling might be more acceptable.

I, unlike some others, don't mind the paginated scrolling. I just think it would be good to be able to quickly flip through pages without delay just because the images are loading.

A good example would be a Facebook photo album. If I click the left arrow as fast as I can, the page keeps flipping instantly. Instead of seeing each picture, I see a small loading icon and a box where the picture will be. When I finally stop mashing the arrow, the picture I'm settled on will load.

I hope you don't find my comments overly critical. It's a beautiful design, just trying to be constructive.

As a Brit, the name makes me giggle :-) (The equivalent US interpretation of how it reads to me being, perhaps, 'airfanny').

Oh, I interpreted it as the UberX version of Airbnb. :D

Wouldn't it be Airbutt/Airass? Or possibly even Airanal.

US here, and I'm laughing at the name too. We did have Tom Green's wonderful Bum Bum Song a few years back, after all.

I was expecting airbnb but for bums (vagrants).

Thought I was the only one :)

I'm imagining a flying ass, shitting everywhere.

So that just made my day. Sure, now I have Mt. Dew all over my monitor, but I can't stop giggling now.

Thank you.

I think it's a questionable prod at Japanese pronunciation of "album".

Air ... out of ... bum? And now I am thinking of farts.

Please don't mess with my ability to scroll through content. Additionally, having content in between the nav breaks is infuriating, and my scroll bar is gone.

Your comment is overly harsh but I find the reaction interesting. It’s getting more common here.

In other cases I’m also disturbed by the broken scrolling but in this case my only complaint is the space bar not working. This is a slideshow, but it feels like scrolling because it goes vertically and the scroll bar works. I’m pretty sure if the scroll bar were completely disabled and there was a [next] button with a different transition you wouldn’t complain because you wouldn’t think of it as broken scrolling, but just as another slideshow.

So, my suggestion to the author: make it slide horizontally.

I would like something like that not as a service but instead to create locally so I can just upload a static directory to my own server (or neocities, etc.) so I don't have to upload my pictures to yet another 3rd party.

Same here. My parents had big books full of pictures of my brother and me. I only have digital photos of my kids.

I'm looking for the equivalent, a local (everything not under my control is out, no saas) solution. Mediagoblin _might_ solve this in the future. Openphoto/trovebox seemed promising. So far I haven't found something that looks right though.

One of the only uses of this type of page scrolling that I actually think works pretty well (YMMV, I'm on Windows/Chrome).

Having said that the name really is so bad that it kills it. I wouldn't send a link around to people in the form of http://www.airbum.co/gmcbay or whatever a user url will look like. I "get" the album connection you're going for but the end result is in expert-sex-change territory as far as how it actually reads, I'd be too embarrassed by the "risky click" looking url.

I didn't even catch the "album" play-on-words. I just read it as "Air Bum," as I'm sure many others did.

Alas, I'm just told that I need to visit the site on my desktop with "a lastest Chrome browser".

The demo is slow as molasses on my 2012-era Macbook Air (Google Chrome). Seems to have something to do with the scroll hijacking, which IMO is usually a bad idea. I wonder if there is a way to do this kind of vertical presentation while still allowing me to use the browser's native scrolling.

So, not a flying tramp? Not an evaporating derrière?

Interesting concept, but I'm with SDGT on breaking scrolling. If it's a slideshow that's one thing, but when you're having me scroll with my touchpad (because nobody wants to click those tiny dots on the right that are overly popular) it's extremely frustrating to not have a direct correlation to the speed with which I'm scrolling. Worse yet is when it scrolls further than I wanted and I have to scroll back up again.

Also, I love Medium's design as much as the next person, but I honestly thought I had landed on a Medium blog for the first few seconds.

Checked the demo, and... why the interference with the scrolling? I saw such design for first when Apple released their rubbish-bin Mac Pro, and later on a BBC article* , and the experience was bad in all.

* “The Reykjavik Confessions”, an excellent read BTW http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27290883

This looks nice, although I agree that I would find the scrolling difficult to put up with.

An alternative, focused on travel mainly: http://maptia.com/maptia/stories/the-overview-effect

My travel documentation is incredibly fragmented between direct emails to family, photos on my phone, dslr photos, blog posts, tweets, facebook posts/albums, etc...

I like the idea of Maptia for aggregating all that into one place, but because of uploading everything everywhere for so long, I really want a solution on my own server and attached to my own domain.

Don't have much of an opinion, as the frontpage, and the demo itself, are broken on Opera 12.

Also broken in IE9

Reminds me a lot of Storehouse, but with page breaks. E.g. https://www.storehouse.co/stories/f5oh-adventures-in-califor...

Product seems simple and clean, very 'Medium' like. The name is horrible.

Thanks for the feedback, I just decided to change the name. Is there a good alternative?

Having 'bum' in the name's been mentioned as funny but it can quickly turn into a liability if work, school and profanity filters interfere with accessing and sharing your website.

I doubt that would be cause for concern, here's a very innocent subset of the 44 words that contain the letters bum.

album bumble bumblebee bumbled bumbler bumbles bumbling bump bumped bumper bumpersticker bumping bumpkin bumpy verbum

That said, they always find a way to build a better fool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

That article is exactly why the name should be changed .... the most recent example is from January this year at the ISP level. It's such a pointless risk to take.

    In January 2014, files used in the online game League 
    of Legends were reported as being blocked by some UK 
    ISP filters due to the names 'VarusExpirationTimer.luaobj' 
    and 'XerathMageChainsExtended.luaobj' containing the
    letters used in the word "sex".[30]"

Change the name. Layout reminds me of Medium. I'd be interested to see the user interface in actually creating the album-- that's what would determine whether I used it or not.

The demo looks great! It would really be a good way to do a trip show case to my beloved.

What kind of product would you want to make it into? An online service or a paid software or even.... open source? :P

Reminds me of https://exposure.co/ - But scrolling and navigating through the site feels a lot smoother on exposure.

Holding the "down" arrow blows up the animation pretty good. I think that your implementation of the scrolling for Mac mice is pretty solid so far.

Anyone else experiencing huge amounts of lagg on that demo page? Am on a 100/100 connection with a decent graphics card and all..

No mobile version: project is already doomed.

Beautifully simple

Airbum?

404

really? I still can access the page

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