AntiPoint Icons

the bars look much better, and they fit in with the site design (notice everything is in bars, no curves except smilies and avatars...which have square boarders)

Damn, I had a bunch written out, and lost it by clicking on the attachment. Hm.

Since I can't do arithemetical functions in Proxomitron, the combined width of the bars will always add up to 100 pixels. But I figure that even then, it takes up less space (horizontal AND vertical) than the text-equivalent does.

As for the mood icons... possible. The trick is finding the right icons to express the mood, most of the common ones will be easy. All you'd really need to do is save the icons as a image with the mood-string being the filename... and you wouldn't need much in terms of multiple-matches.

What about a graphical representation of the antipoint level? A little gradient, from red to green, with little indicator on it... It would take... what? Nine images? Even, slightly (pos/neg), Positive, Negative, Very (pos/neg), Extremely (pos/neg). Maybe the "Extremely" images, or at least the negative one, could be very eye-catching, to help people see those posts which might be suffering from antipoint-bashing...

As for the antipoints above the user name, that could be a bit trickier, I'm not sure. It doesn't seem quite so necessary.

Unless JP changes the site itself, all of the images are on the user's hard-drive, so bandwidth and filesize wouldn't really be that much of an issue, would it? The real issue, I think, is processor time. With a long thread with big posts, the proxomitron might have to sort through a lot of text before finally passing the page over to your browser. Dear lord! Wouldn't it be perfect if Opera had some agreement with the Proxomitron guys to INTEGRATE the pattern-matching-and-editing functionality into the browser!? I'm gonna suggest it to them right now!

Okay, here's a shot of the Antipoint-post-level in action. It has discrete levels for:

Even
Somewhat Positive
Somewhat Negative
Positive
Negative
Very Positive
Very Negative
Extremely Positive
Extremely Negative

Nine images in all, each about 1,177 bytes. I could optimize it a bit more, but that would mean more inserted html junk, some table stuff, and myriad other tiny adjustments to get it to look just right.

I'm going to put off working on the moods until the mood categories are a little more established.

This is sensational - I like your work. :)

My vote would be for the bars to represent how many AntiPoints a user has given out and also that bar representing the user's own AntiPoints is wicked!!

Greg

I like the bar, but just another idea I thought up, what about like a semi-circle indicator? I've tried to draw up a basic diagram (attached below) of what it could look like - I haven't got no where near the graphic design capabilities of you Terr! :)

It would be like the bar you created, indicating how much AntiPoints a user has. Imagine in the semi-circle it fading from red (left) to green (right) exactly how your bar is - I would have put it in, except...well, I don't have the faintest idea how to. :)

Greg

Uhm, thanks. Well, if it was a semicircle it would take up more space vertically (in order to be readable) and it would also increase the overall amount a user needed to download, since the pointer can't be divorced from the background colors and shown seperately.

Hmm.... Animated GIFs would be overkill, wouldn't they...

OK, I've been bored, so I've figured out how to do this gradient thingy (fading in from red to green) and here is a better representation of what I had in mind. Keep in mind I have NO graphic design skills, so it could probably be done better.

(Fingers crossed, hopefully it'll attach this time!)

Greg

EDIT: Ah bugger it, this damn attach isn't working for me - starting to give me the s**ts. Yeah, I guess it would take up more room and harder to make, guess I'll just have to put up with your bar Terr. HEHE - just kidding, the bar is sensational.

Greg

Now that I think of it - Why have two bars for displaying the percentage of given antipoints? The total sums up to 100 anyways, right? Try using the bar you're using right now for the antipoints-level of a post, with underneath written the total of points given (I don't really like the (t)-icon) - let's see how that looks..

Yeah, I considered various things, like putting the red and green ap percentage bars right next to each other... But I don't want to extend the width of the non-content cell containing the avatar and stuff too much if I can help it. In IE, nobody would notice a difference, but in Opera...

I'll mess with it later, mayhap.

Greetings All:

Well, I talked it over with Terr, and he made me up the graphics necessary to do the gradient image for the "antipoint level of this post is". I just got done programming it in, and it looks great! Thanks Terr.

I'll leave this thread open so everyone can discuss terr's other gradient image ideas.