Thursday, September 27, 2012

Siren of Shame 2.0

For our first major release we've got some great new stuff:

New Features

  • Complete UI overhaul 
  • News feeds
  • User stats
  • Getting started wizard
  • View build page
  • View user page
  • SoS Online integration
  • Moved to GitHub


Complete UI Overhaul


We're banking on attractiveness bias.  Hopefully the app is now so pretty that you won't care that it barely works.



"Content first" was our primary objective.  You should also notice:

  • Pretty animations draw your attention to new content
  • Advanced options don't take up prime real estate
  • Users have custom pictures so you can more quickly identify who's done what (they will be customizable in a future release) 
  • The app has more consistency in icons and fonts
For instance we hid the action bar at the top and redid all the icons (and no, it is not nor was it ever a ribbon):


In short we did like 5 minutes of research on design best practices and pretended we knew what we were doing.

News Feed

With the old app you could go out to lunch and your teammates could break the build like 15 times while adding insulting check-in comments, then make a legit check-in seconds before you get back and you'd never know.  No more:



User stats


This may be the coolest feature even if you aren't a baseball fan or an accountant:


Clockwise from top:
  • [big number]: Reputation
  • [yellow disk]: Achievements
  • F: Fail percentage
  • CSB: Consecutive Successful Builds
  • T: Total Builds
  • FSB: # of times Fixed Someone else's Build

Getting started wizard
You're probably an existing user who could care less, but getting started is now far more obvious:



View build page
If you find yourself caring 99% about one build -- yet somewhat wanting to watch others in order to humiliate build breakers from other projects -- then you'll love this feature.  Click the title of a build to get:


  • The selected build always stays on top
  • News gets filtered to just the current build
  • Other projects are still visible, but few details
  • You get a pretty chart of the last 8 build times (numbers in minutes, newest on right)

View User Page

Click a user to get:


From here you can
  • View news, filtered to just the current user
  • View achievements
  • Change a photo
  • Edit a display name

SoS Online Integration

Who isn't into public humiliation, right?  Or at least some heckling.  We now show all SoS Online content right there in the news feed.  If you want to shame someone just type in the textbox and hit enter.  And thanks to SignalR everything is instantaneous.


Moved to GitHub

We finally did it.  We'll keep task requests and releases on Google for now, but the code will love in GitHub at the following location:

https://github.com/AutomatedArchitecture/SirenOfShame

Bugs

We fixed some.  We introduced a ton.  When you find them please see How to Report Errors.

Major Refactoring

If you care to open the hood we're now slightly less embarrassed by what you'll find (particularly with the rules engine).

Summary

We've added lots of great new functionality which we hope will help you increase code quality while having a bit of fun.  Please post your feedback below in the comments, on twitter, on our issues list, on facebook, or heck on SoS Online.

4 comments:

  1. Sweet! Nice one guys, look forward to testing this out. Good choice moving to github

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thanks @WickyNilliams! Yea we've been wanting to move there for a long time, but converting was intimidating. Now seemed like the perfect time to bite the bullet. Looking forward to setting up Travis!

    ReplyDelete
  3. It's very "modern". :)
    Overall, the UI refresh is a positive step. I think it manages to improve the information density without getting too busy.
    Here are a few quick feedback items:
    - The Auto updater for 1.6.x isn't seeing the update yet. I installed manually for now.
    - The UI has some "stickiness" issues. For instance, clicking change beneath a user picture brings up the palette, but the only way to clear it is to actually select a picture. Even clicking the back button doesn't clear it. Clicking on change multiple times also displays the palette multiple times.
    - Clicking on the name in a profile also seems to "stick", even when viewing other profiles. This led to me accidentally renaming one of my coworkers the same as another.
    - The Names in the Builds, News, and Leaders lists don't sync/refresh except on a build. I noticed this because of my mistakenly renamed coworker. He still shows the incorrect name in the builds and leaders list, and the news list displays a third, also incorrect name.

    None of those are major, but I'll try to formally report them later when I get a chance.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great feedback, thank you Eric! Don't worry about formally reporting those errors, I'll take care of them shortly. I didn't want to do the auto updater just yet in case it turned out to be unusable. I'll push out a 2.0.2 to everyone once I've got a better handle on what bugs everyone is seeing.

    ReplyDelete

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