Thursday, April 10, 2014

Improving on the Game Profile Layout

I took a few days break from the website, for my daughters birthday, but am back at the desk working on foreachgamer.com again today.  So far I've added a nice shadow effect for the cells, which makes them pop from the background a bit more.  I've also updated the cell's marked as screenshots to hide the cell-footer, since a description isn't necessary and their really isn't room enough for a caption... I may change this later, but for now, it works.

I then realized that I could use the same system that I programmed for the background images for Webplayer demos and have a custom script take the first image of every game and, with some magic, make it a faded greyscale image.  The result of this afternoons work thus far is depicted in the screen below:

The new profile layout, with shadow effects and a greyscale background image

I was pretty happy with the results, and my next step was to open up screenshots in a lightbox when clicked.  After browsing through open-source lightbox solutions, I am now about 50% of the way completed with the following setup:

The newly integrated screenshot lightbox setup

This lightbox solution only supports images out of the box, but I will be making modifications to support video and html as well.  I'm considering changing what happens when you click any cell in the page; rather than expand the cell to show information, I may have it load html into the same lightbox container that currently loads the screenshots.  This could provide the end-user with a very easy way to scroll through cells, since this lightbox is also swipe-enabled.  We'll see how things go, and whether or not the lightbox solution works better than the current one.


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