Update #12 – Multilingual Support & Friend Invites

Our latest update has some goodies in store for you. We are now proud to say that the site is good enough for you to invite your friends to join the Expono community.

There are now two ways to invite people, one is the NEW direct invitation method where you simply enter an e-mail address and click the “Send Invitation” button.

You will find the “Invite your friends” field on the left side of the front page/dashboard.

The second method has been around for a while and it includes a sharing of albums or single photos.

Go into any of your albums or click a single photo, you’ll notice in the upper right corner a link called “Share”. Click share to invite your friends to see your album or photo.

The user, upon clicking a photo, will be asked to enter a username and fill in some information about him-/herself.

Another great feature enhancement is language support. Norwegian is now added as the first additional language to the site, but the framework allows for adding languages as soon as they are ready. If you want to help, please contact us at:

Expono has been supporting Media RSS for a while, but now we have made it even better and have included authentication to increase privacy controls. You’ll find the Media RSS authentication enabler in your settings; Me (arrow down)/Edit Settings.

If you have been wanting to add contacts directly into your address book, then we have some news for you. Rather than restricting you to importing from Plaxo, Outlook, gmail and the likes, you can now add contacts from within “My Contacts”.

We’ve have improved information about Expono and what we have to offer. In addition to our new frontpage you can read about our great range of Features and our News section, which contains press information, entries from the famous “Expono Blog” and our latest tweets!

Another cool addition is the NEW Chat feature. You can now chat with other Expono users over Meebo. You’ll find the link for that right next to “NEWS” at the bottom.

Did you ever wondered what your friends see, when you have sent them a share invitation? Well, just go into albums and click on the link “URL” in the upper right corner a link called next to “Share”. Now, you’ll see the NEW landing page for your albums and single photos.

Of course last, but not least, there are bug fixes in this new upgrade to make the site work as you would expect it to.

An update on updates

Hi

It’s been a little bit quiet on the blog the last couple of weeks, and that is because we have been cranking code and working long hours to fix bugs, and features requested by you

We are doing an additional update on the site today (which totals over 50 bugfixes since Update #3). We wanted to make sure stuff are stable before we dive into the massive rewrite of our current privacy settings and finish the work on sharing and invites. The new privacy give the you flexibility to have a much more detailed control over who have access to see your photos. We are introducing custom groups, passwords and time limited urls on both album level and individual photo level.

I would like to give you a summary of what has been done in the last 3 updates during the last 4 weeks since we launched our closed private beta:

Update #3 – Smarter Batch Editing and Rotation is here!
2008-10-14 (v0.8.4-2102)

- Manual Rotation is now available under the “More Option” menu on your photo pages
- Greater control in “Edit Photos”. You can now explicit select/deselect the photos you want edit.
- Recent photos tagged of you is now displayed on the dashboard in addition to new photos uploaded by your friends
- Restore Thumbnails. If you have broken photos today you can use this function to restore all thumbnails so they match your original uploaded photo.
- Now you can view all comments made on your photos in the album page!
- Delete or Edit contacts from the Address Book
- Album Search. It is now possible to search through your albums using titles, description or year.
- You now have the choice to apply index numbers to titles when changing the title on multiple photos.
- Improvements to all RSS feeds. You can now choose between 3 types of RSS.

1. New photos by Expono Users
2. New photos by A User
3. Photos in a specific album

- You can now delete, or mark as read, multiple messages at once from your Inbox
- New filter in the photos tab to list photos not in an album
- Lightview (in fullscreen album view) now displays all photos in the album, not only the photos per page.
- Photo description is now available in the slideshow (lightview).
- Popular tags now lists up to 1000 tags!
- It’s now possible to add up to 100 photos with a specific tag to your stack
- You can now add a contact to your address book by clicking on “Add as new” when tagging, if he/she doesn’t show in the autocompleter
- You can now search photos in “Create Album”. – And a bunch of minor bugfixes and enhancements

Update #2 – New Feedback System and lots more
2008-10-03 (v0.8.2-2000)

- New Photos on the dashboard. A much better way to see new photos uploaded by your connections.
- Friends of friends is now conveniently listed on the dashboard, maybe you will find people you know but is not connected with?
- Old feedback system has been replaced by a much better and easier system. Try it!
- Writing a comment on another user’s photo notifies everyone who has commented on the photo before you. This way everybody can join the conversation!
- Now you can change your contacts name and email in your Address Book.
- You can now create an album directly from the photos in a stack
- “Changed Password” has moved from “Your Account” to “Your Profile”
- When you send a connection request to a friend, he/she is automatically added to your Address Book, so now you can start tagging your friends on your photos right away.
- Safari fixes in the album creator. Sorting now works for Safari users.
- Sort order of photos in “Edit Photos” has been fixed.
- It’s now possible to location tag a whole stack of photos without overwriting existing locations, but only photos without one.
- Uploaded photos with GPS data where location lookups fails against geonames are still location tagged, but with coordinates instead of a know location.
- Links/URL are now made clickable in messages
- The RSS feeds now provides photos with a higher resolution
- It’s now possible to list more than 25 connections
- Optimizations to the search indexing
- It’s now possible to browse photos of a tagged person
- Dashboard’s “Let’s get it started” links which has been done are automatically removed next time you login.
- Double clicking a photo in the album creator now set it as cover photo for the album
- Invited users are no longer automatically connected with the person who invited them as friends.
- The user badge now has a direct link to all comments made by a user

Update #1 – Improvements to the uploader
2008-09-30 (v0.8.2-1953)

- Improvements to the uploader (backend and logging)
- Pausing and resuming should now work as expected
- Connection request buttons in your inbox now show correctly action
- Time zones in your profile now shows correct GMT time difference
- Now you can see older activities for made by You and by Others
- Improved the layout of albums in your Inbox
- The layout of your Address Book and your People tab has been fixed for Opera users
- You can also enjoy alphabetically ordered Tag suggestions
- The Fullscreen Album view now works as planned
- UI fixes for users running Firefox version 2
- Logout link is now available in the upper right corner next to the search box.
- Internal adjustments in system logging

The value of usability testing

Never underestimate the value of usability testing. Last week, we invited 5 people over to the office to do some testing. No one outside the office had tested the system before and only one had (barely) seen it before.

We had prepared an iMac in the office with a usability testing software called Silverback. Great piece of software!

Silverback is pretty simple, it lets you record all actions on the screen, including video and audio of the user. It’s easy to spot interaction, mouse clicks are highlighted beautifully. Very simple, but very powerful.

I didn’t realize how much of value this testing was for us.. We got it served to us, black on white. FAIL!

The advanced uploader? FAIL

The batch operations page? FAIL

The signup? FAIL

Well, not really, but they were definitely broken in a usability sense. Why is it so? Because spending hundreds of hours staring at the same damn page makes you blind! So what did we do? We fixed it of course!

Thanks to these testers, we have made some great improvements on usability, but is it enough? I personally think that it is enough now, but in the long run? I believe we have to have another usability evening to answer that one.

We will definitely do usability testing on new features in the future and continue to improve what we have. Please, as soon as we launch beta, help us become better!

Feedback is best given at our getsatisfaction site.

Getsatisfaction is a great place for everyone to vote on features, report bugs, and voice their opinions. You are warmly welcome!

IE Bugs and how it affects us

Most people don’t know how bad a browser Internet Explorer is. We have stopped supporting IE6 because of its limitations and bugs (it is after all a 7 year old browser). How about IE7 then? I’m sorry to say that IE7 isn’t much better. It is amazing how much time we spend on fixing workarounds to make stuff work in IE, its very rare that we have issues with other browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera), they usually work the same way. If not, the bugs will get fixed within a reasonable timeframe.

A little company like us, with only 4 developers, the time spent on IE is very noticable. Time tables gets skewed, delays, and in some cases we have to drop making cool stuff because it simply would take us too much time to make it work on IE. This was one of the reasons we decided to drop IE6.

Now, if only IE7 was as good as it was meant to be. It is not. The most recent bug in IE7 came with a security patch. It broke not only our code, but most of the sites using prototype js library.

I’m not alone when I say, Microsoft, take your responsibility as a marketshare leader and fix your bugs! I believe that not only we (the expono dev team) but thousands of web developer hopes IE8 will put an end to all this.

I also urge all existing users to try out other browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, or even the new google browser Chrome when it comes out of beta (which actually already works better than IE in beta).

We are LIVE! Sort of …

After a couple of weeks of delays we are finally live on our production environment. We have made the bold but sensible choice of going 100% cloud computing. It significantly lowers our costs, and makes it a lot easier for us to scale. We have spent the last 2-3 weeks working on migration and deployment to the cloud. I will return in a future post, compiling a list of benefits and drawbacks. It’s a little too early to say right now.

Next weeks focus will be bugfixing and QA testing the production platform and software. We will slowly start invites as soon as we feel comfortable. Expect the server availability to be somewhat unreliable during next week, as we sometimes need to restart instances to make sure scripts work as expected.