Zynd in the Clowns
posted by Pete Thomas in BuggyRocket, Deluge, Development, LoZC Apps, Public Applications, SWAPs, Zoho Creator, entrepreneurs, situated-applications, small business- 459 views
- 2 comments
Awhile back someone in the Zoho Creator forum asked how to best design a ZC application and I wrote back to the effect that since there isn’t much design involved, it’s best just to suffer through the documentation and play with the interface until you get something close to what you thought you wanted. I’ll now amend that sentiment slightly by stating that it can’t hurt at least to try and write Deluge code that does not induce nausea.
Version 0.01 of Zyndafeed used a kludgy series of shows and hides in conjunction with 50 statically defined form fields to support up to 50 photo uploads. This worked OK from the outside but the implementation is embarrassing and in any case prompting the user with the option to fill out up to 50 text fields on one page is probably ridiculous in the first place.
Version 0.02 takes a different approach (and reduces signficantly the size of our Deluge script) by providing a separate form devoted to image uploads. A one-listing-to-many-photos relationship is established by inserting a listing’s unique_id as a non-unique identifier for rows in the Photos table. When it comes time to generate the feed, any image in the Photos table with a listing id that matches a listing’s unique id gets appended as a a child node. With this change not only are we providing Ted and the BuggyRocket customers with more flexibility (remember that we need to support at least 25 uploads per listing) but we’re also adhering closer to the DRY principle.
Design considerations when hacking out a Zoho application? It can’t hurt. In any case we’ll see what Mark thinks of this new version when he gets a chance to try it out and reply. Some ideas for more features include a monolithic view of listing data instead of views spread over 5 separate screens and some useful filters on whatever views are in place.
Pete,
Version 0.02 of Zyndafeed is a nice improvement over 0.01 in terms of simplicity with regards to the photo uploads. From a design standpoint, 0.02 is nicely created. I don’t think Ted is going to have any difficulty getting the Zyndafeed listing process figured out.
As far as critiquing specific qualities is concerned: It seems like the photo upload process is a bit cumbersome, at least in terms of attempting to upload multiple pictures to a listing in an efficient manner. Perhaps this is a limitation of Zoho Creator or maybe the Deluge script? That is, unless there is a different issue causing the upload process to take a long time. Ted is going to need a lot of time to upload several images and that could really effect profit margins.
After upload, the images appear to get automatically resized. Also, I discovered a tendency to duplicate an image, without the ability to delete it afterward. So, a delete photo option would be handy.
Aside from images, you’re right, Pete - The monolithic view would be a nice improvement over the 5 screen view, but is lower on the totem pole than any limitations to efficiency with the media upload process.
Mark
How about we go back to the 50 fields that are dynamically shown and hidden? It doesn’t make for very manageable Deluge but from a usability standpoint it does let Ted upload a lot of photos at once…and anyway what’s wrong with paying Ted to needlessly click around cumbersome forms all day? That’s what most of us get paid to do…
I think the old approach to photo upload might also minimize the tendency to duplicate photos but yes we’ll also get some sort of deletion facility in there.
Let me know if you’d like to revert back to the old way of doing photo uploads or if you have a different approach in mind.
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