Pandora App Store Suggestion

[Eniko]

While dflemstr points are somewhat valid, it also smacks of "this won't pass the Acid3 test!" style perfectionism, so I can't really fault Craig for reacting like he is either.

EDIT: And yes I know Acid3 is a test for browsers, not sites. Just sayin'.

 

[jonlad1]

Fair enough. I'm just grateful for any appstore B)

 

[Pleng]

Well I'll admit that I'm not using the box simply because of the name, which is stupid because it sounds like a lot better of a solution the Craig's.

Unfortunately dflemstr and myself (mostly dflemstr) are coming up with some well reasoned arguments and Craig is simply saying "no you're wrong".

 

[dflemstr]

Well guys put yourselves in my shoes for a second. I developed a product more than a year ago, and have surely spent at least 50-100 man-hours on it, which is a serious investment on my part. And it was generally accepted, and the devs told me that they'd use it when the Pandora shipped.

Then, one year later, someone comes a long, figuratively throws away my work, and starts working on a, imho, hack which is supposed to bluntly replace what I've developed.

And the validation issue is a huge issue, since it forces users to use either Firefox or Firefox-compatible browsers to access the appstore, but it's a minor issue relatively speaking. Yet it serves to strew salt in my wounds.

 

[CiderPunk]

why are there no anchor links in the listing pages of the appstore?

<li onclick="location.href='../cgi-bin/viewapp.pl?/Emulator/gngeo-0.7-nofrontend.inf';" style="cursor:pointer;"> 
        	<div class="icon">[img]../apps//Emulator/gngeo-0.7-nofrontend.pnd.png[/img]</div> 
   	   	   	<div class="desc"><strong>GnGeo (NeoGeo)
</strong><br /> 
           						The emulator runs at full speed with no glitches. .. 
</div> 
          	<div class="rating">[img]../apps/images/stars.png[/img]<br />  22/6/2010
</div> 
         	<div class="clear"></div> 
 
        [/li]

as a webmonkey by trade that's a shocker! search engines won't understand your onclick links and your sub pages will not get indexed, I recommend adding a link on the name in addition to the onclick thing,

 

[dflemstr]

A well-known fact is that any element actually supports a "href=" attribute under HTML 4 (Not under XHTML however) so it'd be a one-liner for craigix to fix that issue (unless he's not using bound templates and emits that element in his raw code...)

The proper solution would be to use an anchor tag within the [li] element but the current page layout doesn't allow for that.

But yeah, a client without JavaScript can't browse the page, at all.

 

[craigix]

A well-known fact is that any element actually supports a "href=" attribute under HTML 4 (Not under XHTML however) so it'd be a one-liner for craigix to fix that issue

And now, because it was reported, I'll fix it.

See, the system works. 3 bugs squashed in a few posts.

 

[dflemstr]

A well-known fact is that any element actually supports a "href=" attribute under HTML 4 (Not under XHTML however) so it'd be a one-liner for craigix to fix that issue

And now, because it was reported, I'll fix it.

See, the system works. 3 bugs squashed in a few posts.

Well you don't use HTML 4 so that fix won't work. Your page claims that it's XHTML Transitional 1.0 and the actual code is HTML 3. So you'll have to decide on one version and go with it throughout your entire page before you can start trying to make the page valid.

And we shouldn't have to tell you about HTML bugs. We should be telling you about how you could optimize your database queries or which resources take the longest to load. Teaching you HTML isn't "bug reporting".

 

[WizardStan]

what about the bug I reported a few days ago?
http://www.gp32x.de/board/index.php?/topic/53170-appstore-testing-again/page__view__findpost__p__880243

 

[gruso]

You must realize that the reason why your implementation is accepted is that this community has come to accept less than ideal solutions from the OP team, and because you are who you are. If anyone else had done something like this in a different context, it'd have been rejected instantly.

I disagree with this. The reason it's been accepted is that it looks decent and it works nicely, from an end user point of view. The majority of people simply don't give a damn what makes it tick.

You have to realise that you see things like this a few layers deeper than most people. You're talking about the dovetail joints on the coffee table while everyone else is enjoying the coffee. This is in no way an insult; your your knowledge and your abilities have created a backend for The Box that appears to be a wonderful thing. On the flipside, your frontend is not quite as welcoming to average joe.

+1 on you two having a nice cup of tea and building a damn appstore together.

 

[milkshake]

In my experience you should always start your site in the most basic fashon that works without the need for any additional engines i.e. javascript at the end of the day you can include a js file to any page you want which can add attributes to your elements but also if your browser doesnt run javascript or it is disabled your website will still work.

I believe they call this graceful degradation.

i.e.

document.getElementById('testID').onclick=function(){doStuff(passvariable)};

You should always keep your "view" and "logic" separate! plus it makes it easier to alter one without having to change the other.

 

[dflemstr]

The majority of people simply don't give a damn what makes it tick.

Yes, and this is also part of the problem. And then, when the day comes, people are going to be upset when someone figures out how to download an application without paying.

Also, I'm always open to suggestions; if anyone finds the slightest annoyance with the Box's implementation/UI/whatever, I'll fix it immediately. Stuff like that is actually important to me. And the current UI is something I threw together in 15 minutes using standard CSS templates I had lying around; I'm not a web designer. If someone is, please feel free to contact me.

Edit: If it's any comfort; I could duplicate the AppStore UI in an hour. I wouldn't consider it an improvement, but if you guys would...

 

[SomeGuy99]

The Box needs a proper interface and it needs to be more populated, but neither of those are your fault.

Edit: Just loaded the most recent version. What's going on with the fonts?!

I don't like this scroll-load thing either. Just my preference.

 

[jonlad1]

You must realize that the reason why your implementation is accepted is that this community has come to accept less than ideal solutions from the OP team, and because you are who you are. If anyone else had done something like this in a different context, it'd have been rejected instantly.

I disagree with this. The reason it's been accepted is that it looks decent and it works nicely, from an end user point of view. The majority of people simply don't give a damn what makes it tick.

You have to realise that you see things like this a few layers deeper than most people. You're talking about the dovetail joints on the coffee table while everyone else is enjoying the coffee. This is in no way an insult; your your knowledge and your abilities have created a backend for The Box that appears to be a wonderful thing. On the flipside, your frontend is not quite as welcoming to average joe.

+1 on you two having a nice cup of tea and building a damn appstore together.

Ever the diplomat

You ever thought of getting into politics? Theres an election coming up you know....

 

[milkshake]

@craigx

I have also noticed that a lot of the attributes for some of your elements don't use quotations.

<div class=comspace><span class=comusername>geckojsc :<a href=votedown.pl?98.1772400745289&/Application/milkytracker.inf><img src=../apps/images/thumbdown.gif alt=remove width=16 height=15 border=0 align=right /></a></span> Fantastic! This is one of the main reasons I ordered a Pandora. I'm looking forward to the day it finally arrives.</div> 
 
</div>

is this HTML complient?

just a tip dont know if you knew about this site alsready but there is a HTML validator you can use to validate your markup.
W3 HTML validator I believe they offer similar validating services for CSS.
it checks your code for anything that might not be compliant then it tells you so you change it and make it compliant.

 

[gruso]

@dflemstr - The Box will be getting some publicity soon too, I'm told. In the meantime I guess I'll be preparing a post explaining to people why we have three app repos. I do have a minor suggestion for The Box, I'll take it to that thread.

@jonlad - You know what happens to diplomats here. They get buried by union-backed rangas.

 

[dflemstr]

The Box needs a proper interface and it needs to be more populated, but neither of those are your fault.

Edit: Just loaded the most recent version. What's going on with the fonts?!

Heh, the fonts actually originate from an user recommendation; they got tired of the standard web fonts I guess...
You don't really have that much of a choice when you develop web applications, unless you load web fonts.

I don't like this scroll-load thing either. Just my preference.

I have to do it that way to avoid pagination. The guys I asked didn't want pages (with Prev, Next buttons etc), and I don't like the prospect of having 100 apps that all have to be loaded each time someone accesses the Applications page. So I decided to use the "infinite scrolling" trick. If I had a proper internet connection, you wouldn't ever see the "Loading..." label, but my connection is... slow (probably around 256 kB/sec for all of my sites).

Craigix will have to solve the same problem in his app as well, unless he wants to saturate your internet connection each time you visit his site.
Each page load is already 0.8 megabytes on apps.open-pandora.org; each page load on my site is 7 kiB after the cache is filled; aka you download 0.4 megabytes once in your life, and after that, you only download 7 kiB per request.

is this HTML complient?

Heh, I've made sure that he knows that it isn't. I sent in a complete list of all HTML issues 2-3 months ago (or whenever the first beta testing session was, my sense of time is skewed)

 

[craigix]

Yeah we know some of the site isn't compliant right now, but 2.0 is.

2.0 is sort of going live bit by bit today. You will see new bits appearing here and there, but it won't be 2.0 until next week sometime.

More people have upload access now too, so it's slowly coming out of beta and going towards 2.0 in that respect too.

It will get there, all the little bugs will be fixed, I enjoy doing it and so does Trev.

 

[LeChuck87]

both, keep up the good work. competition will make both solutions better. (imo)

after all pandora is open, so everyone can choose which store to use.

 

[SomeGuy99]

... user recommendation ... The guys I asked didn't want pages ...

Well this is a user request: Additional options for normal webfonts and pagination (including a matrix view?).

Also: Catagories.