Disagree. It's not a website, but a portfolio. Agencies and designers have to show off what they can do and a static site with screenshots won't cut it. I'm personally very impressed.
All the more reason to have a good user experience. How likely am I to work with an agency that can't even show me their work in a functional way? Scroll is broken, navigations are broken, weird looping behavior. It feels like an old Dreamweaver site.
Agree that it's a generally different use case, but I'm trying to click through to examples of work and I went through three or four times to what seemed a blank page, returned to the homepage, and started over, before figuring out how to access them.
There are still slight UX requirements even for showy contexts like this.
Now that I'm looking closely, they have an internationalisation flaw: the dates are all in American format. "Italy 09/30/2016" should be 30/09/2016, for example.
And many Americans (myself included) say, "October fourth, twenty-sixteen." We do write it as we say it, just as you suggested. And there's the issue. Are we simply "wrong" for saying it that way?
Maybe it's just because the site is getting hammered, but whether I view it on my phone or computer, I just see a cool visualization of paper planes flying around the world, but I see no way to interact with it at all... Nor is there any explanation of what I am looking at. It looks pretty, but is rather confusing.
You can't interact with it on your PC (as far as I know) but it works on my phone. There should be a little button with a plus sign or paper plane on it where you can create a new plane. Might take some time to appear on first start.
Yeah, it took a good 4-5 minutes for it to start doing anything on my phone... Would be nice if there was some fallback for when it's loading, so I'm not just staring at a 'blank' screen, wondering if anything is happening.
Ehh, I don't know if that counts. Lots of sites want me to join on my phone or download an app, even though they are desktop compatible.
I'm irked when companies go for this form of anti-documentation. It 1) makes me feel dumb 2) wastes my time 3) I'll eventually figure out what you're not telling me, so you might as well cut to the chase.
it's not that silly. We're mostly all developers so its easy to forget but most people dont have desktop computers nowadays. Mobile is the primary experience for many people.
And remember what it was like when they did have desktops?! Thank the gods they use their phones instead now. Leave the desktops to those who know how to actually use a computer.
It keeps saying "You've made 0 planes" no matter how many I make. Apart from that it's a nice little project, it's fun looking at all the stamps and thinking about our connected world.
edit: Ok, after reloading the site it shows some of my planes. Might be a bit overcrowded and slow at the moment.
Basically, you just put a 'stamp' on a piece of digital paper, which shows what city you are in - then you 'fold' the paper into an airplane and make a little 'throwing' motion with your phone, being careful not to let go and fling your phone across the room, and the plane flies off. Then everyone can make a sweeping motion with your phone to catch other people's planes (seemingly random) to view the stamps, and add your own, then throw it back.
This just brought a huge smile to my face! Reminded me how connected we all are in this world. Curious to know how many of the 260K + users that were on as I was came from HN. Perhaps incorporate a visualisation of where users are from.
Very cool. Does anyone know if the way you "throw" the plane actually affects it's trajectory? I'm curious what level of detail they are using behind the scenes for sending the planes around the world.
I suspect not... The first plane I threw pretty softy, because I wasn't sure how much force was necessary, and in a couple minutes it traveled from Washington State to Serbia.
Basically, you just put a 'stamp' on a piece of digital paper, which shows what city you are in - then you 'fold' the paper into an airplane and make a little 'throwing' motion with your phone, being careful not to let go and fling your phone across the room, and the plane flies off. Then everyone can make a sweeping motion with your phone to catch other people's planes (seemingly random) to view the stamps, and add your own, then throw it back.
When you click on the small info button the second paragraph says "Visit paperplanes.world on your computer to throw planes into your screen". Is this actually a working feature? I did try it and it actually seems like a plane with the same colour appeared shortly after I launched it with my phone. That might still be coincidence though since there are a lot of planes.
edit: I've tried it about 20 times or more now, and I'm pretty certain that it actually works. I'm guessing all planes that are being launched at the moment are displayed live with their correct colour?
I saw Paul Irish tweet this [0] a few days back. Hopefully this doesn't come off as too negative, but I disagree with it being a "beautiful web experience". I tried it on my Nexus 5X and it's not a smooth experience, and that's with Chrome on a high-tier phone that isn't even a year old. With Firefox for Android, my default mobile browser, it seems to struggle even more.
With that said, I think it's an impressive demo. I'd love to look over the unminified source.
It's worth noting that it doesn't appear to load properly if you're using uBlock Origin; I had to toggle it off for the demo to work.
"It was a student who gave me Francis. One Spring afternoon I discovered a bowl on my desk, just a few inches of clear water in it. Floating on the surface was a flower petal. As I washed, it sank. Just when it reached the bottom, it transformed into a wee fish. It was beautiful magic, wondrous to the behold. The flower petal had come from a lily, your mother. The day I came downstairs, the day the bowl was empty, was the day your mother..."
~Horace Slughorn, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Much to my delighted surprise, it renders very smoothly in Firefox 45 on this rather resource-constrained machine, in a way that stuff like this almost never does.
If they got it when it was originally released it's 2 years old now which is pretty old for any electronics in terms of where it'd sit on the performance curve.
201 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadIt featured prominently at the beginning of the video stream.
There are still slight UX requirements even for showy contexts like this.
paid by google.
I assume they have a very good match between good front-end engineers, webgl and designers to make these kind of magic happen.
To see more demos like that button, I highly recommend Tympanus/Codrops: http://tympanus.net/Tutorials/CSSMaskTransition/ (keep clicking on the arrow to see them all).
Looks great, would love to know how it works.
http://i.imgur.com/zTN5ERk.jpg
Wonder if this is a geolocation failure that produced that stamp.
Or maybe cities in disputed areas, like Jerusalem or Sevastopol.
But it's not unreasonable to write the date the way it is spoken. I say "[Tuesday the] fourth of October, twenty-sixteen", so I write 4/10/2016.
I'm irked when companies go for this form of anti-documentation. It 1) makes me feel dumb 2) wastes my time 3) I'll eventually figure out what you're not telling me, so you might as well cut to the chase.
Firefox is my primary browser even on Android. It didn't work on it, so I suspected and tried it on Chrome. It works there.
It was successful too. I pulled out my phone.
Firefox is my primary browser even on Android. It didn't work and I suspected and tried it on Chrome. It works there.
They should say to open in your phone browser, then I would have tried it.
They should say to open in your phone browser, then I would have tried it.
edit: Ok, after reloading the site it shows some of my planes. Might be a bit overcrowded and slow at the moment.
Basically, you just put a 'stamp' on a piece of digital paper, which shows what city you are in - then you 'fold' the paper into an airplane and make a little 'throwing' motion with your phone, being careful not to let go and fling your phone across the room, and the plane flies off. Then everyone can make a sweeping motion with your phone to catch other people's planes (seemingly random) to view the stamps, and add your own, then throw it back.
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12630637
Then you can catch other planes, see who else has stamped it, add your own stamp and throw it back with the others. Quite neat.
I sent out a few planes on Thursday and they've already been stamped in Thailand, Italy and Massachusetts. So cool. :)
Looks like it's no longer on the app store. It was, and still is, a fun idea.
Very cool.
edit: I've tried it about 20 times or more now, and I'm pretty certain that it actually works. I'm guessing all planes that are being launched at the moment are displayed live with their correct colour?
With that said, I think it's an impressive demo. I'd love to look over the unminified source.
It's worth noting that it doesn't appear to load properly if you're using uBlock Origin; I had to toggle it off for the demo to work.
[0] https://twitter.com/paul_irish/status/781895377737756672
The 6p is the high tier one.
"It was a student who gave me Francis. One Spring afternoon I discovered a bowl on my desk, just a few inches of clear water in it. Floating on the surface was a flower petal. As I washed, it sank. Just when it reached the bottom, it transformed into a wee fish. It was beautiful magic, wondrous to the behold. The flower petal had come from a lily, your mother. The day I came downstairs, the day the bowl was empty, was the day your mother..." ~Horace Slughorn, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
http://i.imgur.com/xMVXDUv.jpg