Dynamic Image Bugs & Suggestions

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. :wink:

Thanks!

I remember there used to be a WP logo like the one on this sig:

How hard would that be to make as an option? Could we have it, please? :slight_smile:

You could just upload it and click the share checkbox?

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?

What? This is 100000% easier than WSI.

Wiki article: http://whatpulse.org/wiki/index.php/Dynamic_Images

I haven’t finished it yet but at least you’ll be able to add more than one thing after reading it. :wink:

[quote=X-Kal]I remember there used to be a WP logo like the one on this sig:

How hard would that be to make as an option? Could we have it, please? :)[/quote]

Adding images is the roadmap, just not sure when. (a lot of other stuff have priority)

On WSI you had to specify the X and Y coordinate yourself, here you can drag and drop…I fail to see how this way is harder to do?

If I still had it.

Oh :stuck_out_tongue:

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? :slight_smile:

Hmm i cant get the key/mouse click to work !!

whatpulse.org/dynamic-images/170498.jpg

What is the Prob ?

Are you typing in %totalmouseclicks% etc?

Yes i am…
%totalmouseclicks%
and
%totalteycount%

Ah, that would be why.

Have a quick read of my Wiki article on the Dynamic Images: http://whatpulse.org/wiki/index.php/Dynamic_Images

It’s not quite finished yet but gives you an idea of what to do. Good luck!

Bugs:

  • Vertical apostrophes (’) in text cause a backslash to be visible in the image. Real apostrophes (’) 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.

Otherwise, great work!

I’m guessing naughty Wasted forgot the stripslashes() & urldecode() strings. :frowning:

Yes. Not sure if I’m able to actually tell anyone so I won’t, but yes there is a very good and valid reason. No one will like it but c’est la vie.

I agree. Wasted was looking for more ideas for Premium Services some time ago and I think these would be the perfect addition!

I also like the rest of your ideas… You should be our official ideas man. :wink:

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.

Add the option to type in coordinates and font sizes. Can’t stand that drag and drop crap.

Also add bold, and Segoe UI. Speaking of which, it seems the font selection box doesn’t even work anyway.

Also, output in PNG. JPEG and GIF are both absolutely terrible.

And why is there a huge “Slipknot” picture in there when you have a size limit?

How can you not stand drag and drop…

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.