Update: Dynamic Images has now been released mainstream as you may have noticed. We’re still looking for bugs and suggestions though, so please either post them here or on our Redmine tracker.
Hi!
The former WSI (WhatPulse Signature Images) was wildly popular and unfortunately it does not seem to come back any time soon. This is why I started working on a section on the website called Dynamic Images (images can be used for more than just forum signatures).
It’s ready for a somewhat public beta, before I put it on mainstream. You can find it on: http://whatpulse.org/dynimg/
Please have a look, create your image, look for bugs and give me feedback to improve it! The main instructions are on the site, so it should be easy to create one.
The application is not ready for mainstream, so please don’t tell all your friends just yet. I want to make some improvements to the webservers before releasing this as well, so we make sure the website can handle it.
Depending on how many bugs I put it, final release should be soon.
It’s so hard to make these images work. You can only have one thing on them? The offbeat site was great for the image creation- Could you give us those same options?
Wahey, nice to see this back in action, although I have a lovely amount of hits on my l33tsig, and it looks pretty, so I think I will be keeping that for now until this is fully done and out of beta, then I will defo be switching. Seems you have enough of the members testing already, unless youd like me to test it out?
Vertical apostrophes (’) in text cause a backslash to be visible in the image. Real apostrophes (â) cause the unicode escape sequence to be displayed (%u2019).
When I go back to the Editor page to design my existing image, all the text/stat items in Courier New font have doubled up.
The Courier New font looks normal on the Editor page, but in the actual .jpg it’s thicker, squarer and ugly. This is not just because of jpeg compression. I can take a screenshot of the Editor page and save it as a .jpg with 40% quality, and the text still has a nicer shape to it. Perhaps there’s an anti-alias option you can turn off. Or maybe rendering the image as a .png and then converting it to .jpg could give much better results. Have a look at the difference between the % symbols and the numbers in particular:
Suggestions/questions:
Is there a reason why miles aren’t an option?
Add the option for premium members to use full colour .png, because .gif has the 256 colour limit.
Is the highly visible jpeg compression a deliberate incentive to get more users to sign up for premium services? Even just 1KB or 2KB extra would make the .jpg images look significantly nicer.
Show the font size in the editor, so it’s easier to know when you have the size you want.
Show the X/Y coordinates of each text/stat so it’s easier to line them up. Just look as the misalignment in wasted’s sig between the “Last updated:” text and the date/time! :razz:
When you click ‘Add Text’, give the new bit of text the same size/font/colour settings as the previous item. It would save time if you want to add lots of text with the same settings.
Allow us to delete our background images if they aren’t in use.
One more minor bug: on the Editor page, it doesn’t work if you use up/down arrows to cycle through drop down options instead of using the mouse to open & close the drop down each time. I’m usually more of a clicking sort of person, but I tried it because I thought it might be a quicker way to try all the different statistics.
[quote=bette]Yes i am…
%totalmouseclicks%
and
%totalteycount%[/quote]
It would be nice to have the option to type things like this into sentences. Otherwise we have to spend the time adding more text items to our image and lining them up manually. Plus, the stats can change in length. For example, it could be really annoying if you want to write about a rank in a sentence, but it’s hovering around 99th-100th place.
Can’t stand drag and drop either - too difficult to line things up.
Think navigation around the editor could be a lot better - a simple button from the design screen back to the main screen, and the same in the preferences section, would make it a lot more usable.