Species Dictionary and Lightbox
October 9th, 2009 by Richard LovelockThis week has been a fairly short development week for iSpot with a fairly long team meeting on Monday, Richard G on annual leave Thursday and Friday and myself on leave today (Friday).
Richard G has continued to work on developing the species dictionary functionality which will provide the ability for users to make searches using the English or scientific name for what they have spotted. Richard has made great progress with this and gave me a quick demonstation of how it works. Initial impressions suggest that this really will be a great piece of functionality for iSpot and should help to engage the users. There have been issues trying to decide on the best way to use the data that we have to drive this functionality and the best way to present this to the user in a way that is helpful without being complex and it looks like Richard is well on the way to achieving this.
Following the team meeting on Monday, I began looking at a way to present to the user the names of users who have given agreements to identifications on iSpot. Whilst I was doing this I was reminded of some functionality called Lightbox which uses jQuery to present content to users which overlays the content of the referring page in an aesthetically pleasing way. I then realised that this could have a multitude of applications to various parts of iSpot. I have implemented the functionality to images on observations and this is now live. I am now looking at implementing a gallery view of the the latest 50 observations on iSpot which can be opened from the ‘Latest observations’ section on the home page and each of the images will have a title that will link to its relevant observation. I will then look at applying this to the identification of users who have made agreements of observation identifications. There are other potential uses that we can look at for this such as popping forms up, help text, map content. This is all a little speculative at the moment and needs some investigation but there is certainly the potential for other applications of Lightbox.
Neighbourhood Nature (S159) students have now begun to submit there observations to release their ECA so I have been liasing with Adrian Dodd and Phil Butcher to make sure that the XML file that iSpot is creating as a result of these submissions is being created, emailed and imported succesfully. Things seem to be going smoothly so far.
It looks like the rack space for the new research server will soon be available so that we can continue building and configuring the iSpot disaster recovery solution.
October 10th, 2009 at 11:11 am
Interesting developments. I like the light box pop-up, but it can be slow to load and I think that this could be a killer. Most users are impatient and fickle!
October 10th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
I do understand your point and I have been giving it some thought. The time it takes to load is dependent on the size of the image that is opening. The time for the Lightbox animation to open is configurable and is set to be very quick (0.5 seconds I think at the moment and we could reduce this more). Lightbox is opening the original, full size image and rescaling it to fit the screen and then showing the full size when you click on the icon in the bottom right hand corner. You may notice that the full size original is very quick to show if you expand the scaled image, this is because Lightbox has already loaded the full size image.
An alternative is to show the mid size picture but this would then not allow the user to view the original image unless we think of another way. We could perhaps educate the users with a news post about it.
It is such a nice piece of functionality that it would seem a shame to lose it (in my opinion) it also solves an issue that Richard, Mike, Martin and I were talking about during the break in the team meeting last week but I am open to discussion and thoughts about how to change it or discard of it.
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:06 pm
It seems to have got faster. Maybe you tweaked it or something? Anyhow, its now great!
October 22nd, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Hi Jonathan
Thanks for the positive feedback.
Yes I have been have a play around with this. I have changed it now so that the images that are being loaded are the ‘preview’ size and they are all fairly similar in size (bytes-wise) compared to the original images which were loading before – the size of these files varied a lot and some of them were very big as you can imagine.
This seems to have sped things up quite a lot and made it more consistent. The user can then use the title link at the bottom of the lightbox image display to view the original image if they would like to.
I hope you’re having or that you had a great trip.
Richard