276 replies to this topic

[Hochler]

[edit] General question for Craig. Do you plan to go ahead with the app rating feature? As I understand it, ratings were removed from the file archive because they were too easily skewed by idiots. Beta releases with known bugs, or emus that "won't run Goldeneye", are going to be downrated into the ground by people who don't understand WIP software.

Maybe ratings could be applied to paid-for software only?

How about replacing them with "Guru Picks"?

[adolobe]

When I first read about the appstore, I assumed it would be more or less like this:

i vote for this one. Big Icon's at the top and clean lines and easy navigation if you mimic it on your screen using your finger =P

[Kagato]

I've listed categories down the left, and treated the generated groups (most popular etc) much the same as regular categories.
At the bottom is a tabbed pane showcasing a subset of the selected item (random/most recent/highest rated, as appropriate; depending on Javascript support it could dynamically update). Clicking on the arrow shows the full listing.

I'd try to support a collapsing category list, so you can space things out more for easier stylus/fingertip navigation.



Category view, also showing some example logged-in features. (It doesn't make much sense to have an Upload link without being logged in.)

There's more to add to the header row (News, Help/About etc) so I'd shrink the logo a fair bit to make room for more buttons.

[Xian Long]

maybe you could have a separate "guru" rating and user rating.

[darien]

Here's another. I actually had to redo it blowing everything up about 20% after measuring the preview screen to 4.3 inches to see how it would look like. Shouldn't be too small for fingers, just perfect for the stylus.

[Paradox]

Here's another. I actually had to redo it blowing everything up about 20% after measuring the preview screen to 4.3 inches to see how it would look like. Shouldn't be too small for fingers, just perfect for the stylus.

ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.

Edited by Paradox, 07 December 2009 - 07:32 AM.

[Consequence_9]

I really like ^this^ one, well done!

[absolofdoom]

I like conso's and darien's the best. Though, wouldn't it be possible to put more than one theme up and let the person using the site choose which one they want to use? I've seen it on a lot of sites (especially forums).

[El Jefe]

Here is mine:
http://jefe.comxa.com/Apppand/

Its really early, but I only just figured out how to implement the drilldown in browser, so it won't take long for me to fix it up to a much nicer version
I made it in dashcode, I will add a bar at the top with a home screen button for a "featured" page and I will continue adding categories until it reaches the actual selection of program level
also, its extremely flexible, dashcode makes it for iphone, so it will have no trouble fitting on pandora.
edit: forgot to mention, it takes all the lists in json format, so its easy to add and manipulate the lists

Edited by El Jefe, 07 December 2009 - 08:10 AM.

[meltingice]

Damn, I really wish I had more free time because I would love to give this a go. Is there any sort of timeframe we're looking at here for template submissions?

[Kagato]

Here's another.

OK, I don't think I'll bother updating mine, because that's pretty much perfect.

Maybe a "more info" link below Newly Added (to view them in list form like Featured), and rearrange the product stats more horizontally so save on space, but otherwise you're done.

Good job, Darien!

[Tripmonkey_uk]

Damn these look sexy. Faves so far are Dariens and Kagatos.
Kagatos categories would be harder to hit with a finger, so I'd probably vote for Dariens at the moment.
Nice work guys

EDIT: I also like the idea of intergrating it into Pmenu too.

Edited by Tripmonkey_uk, 07 December 2009 - 09:52 AM.

[Vorporeal]

Yep, Darien's a winner. I'm very much into user-interface design and human-computer interaction (currently an undergraduate student pursuing a degree in CS), and I've had serious issues with many of the previous submissions (not to mention that many things in them would be a coding nightmare or impossible, like updates), but this one puts all the others to shame (no offense to anyone else, seriously).

A few suggestions:

• Try to limit the sidebar to only containing navigation items. It's nice to have something like top-rated apps on the sidebar, but they're not really necessary. It might be better to have links to the top-rated app list, most-downloaded app list, etc in the sidebar instead of the actual lists themselves.
  
• You should add a button for login/logout somewhere, probably on the top bar.
  
• Consider making the top bar a bit smaller? It seems slightly larger than necessary to me, but it might not be when appropriately scaled.
  
• Ratings would be better using either a numerical ratio (3.4/5.0) or images - using asterisks isn't ideal (and could be hard to see, especially for people with certain kinds of visual disabilities).
  
• If the newly added section could be interactive, that would work quite well here. (For an example of what I'm envisioning, try going to Amazon, going to the page for some product, and scrolling down to the bottom. There should be a box titled "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought", with a couple items listed and buttons for scrolling the list to the left and right. That would work well, and would allow us to comfortably display the title of the application under the image.)
  
• The home button might not be necessary - just make the Pandora icon in the top-left link to the home page.
  
• It might work well to have the "Welcome, <name>" and a logout link to appear in that area below the top bar and the categories list. (If this and the above suggestion are implemented, we could have a "linked list" of navigation links in that top bar - "Games>RPGs", "Emulators>SNES", "Apps>Office", etc.)
  
• If the above is implemented, it could be an expanding box that has "Welcome, <name>!" as the title (with a logout link next to it), and then links to user-specific pages (my uploaded files, my recent downloads, my account, etc.) in the expanded part.
  
• It might make more sense to only display the size of each category for the subcategories and not for the top-level categories. Showing that the store has 800 games isn't as useful as showing that there are 30 RPGs, 100 FPSs, etc.

Yeah, I'll admit that's a lot (and I could probably come up with a few more). It's already very nice as it is, but the more user-friendly we can make this interface, the better. If we really want the Pandora to take off as a platform, we need a good web-based front-end for our application repository. Having a more clean and polished interface makes the whole project look more professional, and could make the difference between a significant commercial project taking us seriously or putting us off as a market not worth their time.

Edited by Vorporeal, 07 December 2009 - 10:18 AM.

[Trevsweb]

drools at (naw)mcx's design. nice finger friendly idea, loved the concepts shouldve stuck to your concept however. the lists on the side shouldnt really be needed. and you couldve encoperated the panda logo and search into the grid

i will get to work later see if i can do anything to help. however i feel ive joined the boat too late :/

not sure why we are wholey concerned that the store is only 11k etc as we will be using wifi anyway. guess it keeps bandwidth down but i doubt with external css and re-used images the next pages after the initial load would be smaller anyway.

Edited by Trevsweb, 07 December 2009 - 10:21 AM.

[El Jefe]

Why not keep the html + css + javascript files local, and only get the xml files from teh intarwebs?
right, cuz then it wouldnt work anywhere else...
but I guess you could also keep a copy online, for access on devices other than pandora.