Thanks for the suggestions.

We're working on a better homepage right now, but it's taking a while because we kinda (really) suck at design.

I agree that the click to reserve ux is bad. But I think it's also a thing you only need to learn once, then you'll know stuff is in the sidebar. Taking up the whole page is pretty strange because nothing else does that at the moment, but this might change. For now, we'll add some hints to direct you to the sidebar when you click on one of those available tiles.

If you're a web developer, backbone.js will teach you how to make gui apps!

I've been working with MVC style frameworks for quite a while on the server-side but until backbone I've never been able to get my head around how to create a gui app using MVC. It was never clear where and how to put things and before I knew it, everything would go spaghetti on me.

I've done lots of js and lots of js intensive apps and I always hated it because of all the lack of structure and mix of concerns everywhere.

For the last two months, I've been using backbone.js, underscore.js, jammit and coffeescript (which is also made by jashkenas) in a quite complex app. Because of them I was able to massively rework things based on changing requirements without ending up with dead code, or strange pieces that are somehow working but not really needed.

I can't say this enough. Backbone.js really helped put order in my code and it was so easy to pick up that I am convinced you're really hurting yourself by not using it. The documentation is amazingly well done and has real examples of how you'd use the code, instead of just being generated from arguments and other relatively unimportant stuff.

Thanks jashkenas and samuelclay! And congrats on finally launching documentcloud.org. Keep kicking ass!

I second this. Even though it took me a while to wrap my head around Backbone.js (I guess more examples would have helped, e.g. of apps using nested models), now that I got it working, it allows me to do a lot with just a little bit of very clean code. CoffeeScript is also awesome for cleaning up your client side code base.

IE is not supported at all. IE9 might work through some divine intervention, but we didn't test it.

Opera 11 should work fine and it actually does works fine for us, just tested it right now. But, thanks for the report, we'll look into it a bit more.

Opera 11 [build 1156] looks like the CSS is broken. Not supporting IE means the easy-to-use meme is more likely to be stillborn.

I'd really love to hear if you have some ideas about uncluttering it. We've iterated lots of versions till we got to this state.

The canvas drawing confusion seems to be quite spread. We'll definitely have to add something about it.

Oh wow, that's but is nasty.

Let me explain why you got that, you'll find it hard to believe, I promise :)

We use an iframe to upload the tiles directly to s3 and s3 redirects back to the site on success. However, in firefox 3.6, if you refresh the page with such an iframe present, it'll reload the last iframe src, even if the src is now about:blank, because you've just reloaded the page. So, in effect it'll hit the "tile just uploaded" page again. Which is a completely stupid thing to do.

Therefore, when we receive one of the s3 uploads, we also redirect to a page which expresses how we feel.

You might ask yourself why you saw it at sign out. Because we're idiots and the code that remembers the last page you saw to be able to redirect correctly after sign in/sign out remembers this request.

So, I'm guessing that you uploaded a tile, then hit signout immediately, amirighte?

Will go back and look over usability stuff again, but just quickly yeah id just uploaded then logged out (In latest stable chrome btw, not ff).

Yup, FF is just the root cause. We didn't do any browser sniffing for the fix.

I hope you have a low threshold for this addiction and you'll get the bug again.

Sorry, tzigla auth is not gonna happen. We can add other providers tho if people really hate both twitter and facebook.

ps: in the meantime, you could sign up with with: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php

We have custom one click integration with them, they're our lovely shiny delicous first users.

openid and google would be handy, but that's just me, not sure on the masses. Will sign up for watp and get started.

Tiles have a creative element, scarcity and a time constraint. I always wind up getting hyper competitive and tearing through as many as I can in a session. It's an evil crack-like substance for arty types.

Good idea about google. OpenID probably won't add much tho.

Hope to see you around the boards then :)

Thanks for the feedback.

We already did the user testing with 3 people. It was painful to watch, sigh. But that was two iterations away and we learned a lot since. Or so we thought.

Were you expecting to actually draw something while being on the site? This seems to be a common gotcha and thing we don't explain well yet.

Maybe we should make it clear that tzigla is not actually an editor. Or maybe we should just plug one in.

yes, was expecting that :)

Nice idea. Will definitely look into automating this.

Thank you, just posted to deviantart!

My dream is that the old school tiles.ice.org people will stumble upon (ha!) tzigla and want to moderate boards.

Try irc. Efnet #ice

Thanks! Joined. :)

New tiles receive edges from their neighbours, and they must make sure they blend in correctly.

When a tile is uploaded back, we discard the edges that would overlap existing tiles and present that to the curator to confirm the tile is correct.

Sorry, I forgot to mention. For some strange reason, I'm not looking to make money out of this. At some point I was considering it, but decided that just making people happy and having a fun project to play with is good enough for now.

Thanks for the advice tho. Most of it applies even if I'm not looking to monetize in some way.

People will be made happy giving or receiving mugs and t-shirts with good designs on them. By all means leave the ads out of the equation if you're not interested in exploiting that angle, but there's no need to leave money on the table.

That's awesome, but be wary of your bandwidth rocketing up faster than you can afford to pay for it...