New Features for June

Howdy howdy howdy. How's your June so far? Pissing rain there, too? Awesome.

Quick update on what I've been working on for the site over the past few weeks, then I'll get out of the way so Kip can bring you some overdue Fun Facts and Useless Information. Sound good? Too bad.

Live Feed Overhaul
I've been hard at work making the Live Feed better, which has entailed a lot of coding and many ridiculous kludges to deal with various technical difficulties (*cat trained to pull string attached to Jazz's computer meows from box under desk*). Let's just say my plan at one point involved building a robot, and leave it at that. Anyway, success has found us at last and the new Live Feed is doing what I want it to do.

What's that? For one, it's pulling a new image every 5 seconds now instead of every 20 seconds like it was before. So you now have 4x as much Live Feed to love, and shouldn't have to wait all that long for a new image should the current one displease you. But even better, the Live Feed is now changing channels every time it takes a grab, cycling through 15-20 different channels to bring you primo variety.


You'll also notice that instead of getting the "Seconds Until Next Grab" countdown for the Live Feed, you'll get a spinning blue logo. When it comes to the Live Feed, the countdown was always only an estimate at best, because of network conditions determining upload speeds or the screengrabber itself needing to reboot periodically. Because of this I've decided to go with this animated logo instead, which will say "Newer Grab Available" as soon as the next Live Feed grab is actually available.

Scrolling Blue Hands
Our other big update involves the blue hands you click beneath the screengrabs on the caption-entry screen to move between older and newer grabs. The old hands refreshed the entire entry form when you clicked them, which was fine but not cool enough. New hands? The shit. Total shit. You click the new hands and the screengrabs scroll by all bitchin'-like, and you don't have to wait for anything to load. You're probably better off just going and checking it out rather than relying on my description here, but imagine panning left or right over a strip of negatives. It's sort of like that. Only awesome.


Grabatron Improvements
Based on valuable capper feedback that I took like a man and totally didn't spend a half-hour crying in the bathroom over, I've made a few enhancements to the Grabatron. For one, the new Live Feed provides so many grabs that scrolling through Grab Bag sets in the Grabatron can get a little overwhelming. So I've added a Channel Filter at the top of the Grab Bag sets that lets you choose to see just the grabs from your selected TV channel.


By the way, you may see a few grabs here or there that clearly are not from the channel you selected. This is because the Live Feed screengrabber is running so fast now, it occasionally captures a grab before the channel has finished changing, so we'll end up with a grab that's actually from the channel before the one it is labeled as. Only way to fix that is to slow the whole thing down, and for now I'd rather have a faster screengrabber that only occasionally shits the bed.

Other Improvement: Choosing grabs can also be confusing when more than one person is picking grabs for the same program at the same time, so I've recoded the Grabatron to hide sets someone else is currently picking grabs for. If a set hasn't been touched in five minutes, it'll show back up in the Grabatron for everyone else. I've also improved the menu at the top of the Grabatron that tells you how many of each category we have available for grab-picking. Previously, if a set was finished but I hadn't added it to the catalog yet, it would still count for that tally even though you wouldn't see it in the Grabatron anywhere. Now? Nope. Life sucks no more!

Now get out there, seize the day, and cap that guy with no arms.

-Jazz

ps- Oh, and don't forget to join us Saturday night (6/23) to celebrate Occupant's birthday!