Fresh & Fried
By Lemon - Mar 26, 2012
Dear users,
It has been almost one year since our last update, we had promised you a lot of features and we hope we don't disappoint with this new update to the website.
With this update we bring you some new features:
- Facebook and Twitter connect integration
- Revamped dashboard with search ability
- Checkin to your episodes with an optional message
- Tweet or post your checkins to your facebook wall
- Notification center to make it easier to see who mentions you and who wants to be your friend
- Revamped episode pages making it easier to mark multiple episodes as watched
- You can now checkin to episodes without following a show
In addition, a couple things have changed that effect the behavior of a couple buttons
- We removed the acquired option to episodes
- Unfollowing a show no longer removes your checkins for that TV show
We have also made some improvements on the design and usability of a few pages:
- Brand new homepage
- Improved the dashboard with more informative activity streams of your friends
- More filter options for the various show discovery pages
- Improved the profile pages
- The tag pages now allow you to sort and filter shows
- Searching for tags is now possible
As well as some other features and improvements that we leave you to discover.
We hope that you enjoy this update and don't hesitate to leave us some feedback on the update as comment.
Followmy.tv's Team.
Comments
@josbeir I didn't check it, I thought It will storage ALL the tags searched, you can only have 1 tag searched.
btw congrats about the notificacion icon, it works very well :)
@SeiTaN Why would you want to remove de search tag? You can just switch back to the unwatched/pinned tabs with no refresh ?
* Vertical list gives a bit visual issues because many shows only have only 1/2 seasons... Others have like 20.. horizontal placement was giving us the best option .
We'll check how we can improve it tho.
The Episode List page is now too long (each episode takes too much vertical space), I dearly miss "Aquired" and I don't like the 3-click Checkin (was 2-click before).
How about a 1-click checkin by clicking the number of stars next to an episode with the option to add a comment?
On the other hand I really like the option to sort and filter the tag pages, though I'd like to be able to use multiple tags in the same search, i.e. hbo+comedy.
no more acquired? arg... this is what made followmy.tv better than others...!
Some "issues"
-How can I remove search tag from dashboard avoiding refreshing (F5) dashboard?
- In a show's the bulk editor, the position of list of seasons being vertically is weird to me, Could it be horizontal?
Sorry my english, thanks guys.
@Jakurdo Indeed, they are not there (anymore), but currently the episodes list page has no functions besides the information that is shown.
I would be a fan of this config:
- episodes page: button to checkin (under the rating for each episode) + button at the top to mark the whole season as watched
- “bulk edit" to use the checkboxes + 4 actions
@jaaan That's true, but then again, you can't edit anything in the normal episode screen right? Or did I just miss those buttons?
@Jakurdo agreed, you can do that in the bulk edit screen, but not in the normal episodes screen.
@jaaan Quick fix for "mark the whole season as..." At the top, next to the watched, not watched etc buttons, you can click an icon that selects every episode of that season. Then you can just click watched and presto, you marked the whole season as watched ;)
Overall a good update (I specifically like the comments per episodes on the profiles).
3 points of improvement though:
- Checkin > Checkin: 2 clicks. Understandable that you want to push the ratings / comments system, but the 2 buttons should at least be on the same vertical line to make the 2 clicks more intuitive.
- Putting the bulk editor on a separate page: good choice, but I miss the buttons per episode (could be placed under the episode rating (hidden)), and I miss the "mark the whole season as..." buttons. In the episodes list it is also not indicated which ones you've seen.
- Instead of "1" and "2" indicating the seasons, put "Season 1" and "Season 2" (larger area to click). Also a "Show all" button could be beneficial.
Again, overall it's a good update with some nice new features / added visuals, but I do miss (some aspects of) yesterday's clean and fast UI.
Wow, I just "watched" an episode of a show I'm not following, that's awesome. It's great that I don't have to start following (and usually subsequently ignoring, because otherwise it'll start clogging up my dashboard) a show just because I saw one or two episodes. Great update! (I can even "love" a show I'm not following! ... not sure when I ever want to do that though ;) )
@carlinhosbraum I completely agree. That one was better before. Now, just annoying.
Your selection on the dashboard for the 2 two top menu items are now persisted. It no longer always switches back to "My unwatched episodes" if you leave the page
@Jakurdo Yea, thats coming, and is long overdue actually :-) We'll test the bug you described, should auto expand normally tho.
@oranges thanks for the positive feedback! Updates should be deployed much faster now.
1 small suggestion I have is that it would be cool to see what my friends rated episodes. Now that their rating shows up when they checkin an episode, would it be possible to see, when I visit an episode's page, what my friends (who watched it), rated it back then?
And a bug I just encountered, I typed a comment on a friend's checkin from my dashboard (in the checkin stream). But when I typed more than one line, the box didn't expand. It did register the text on the second line (it appeared when I pressed enter to post the comment), but it didn't expand during writing of the comment. It's strange that I didn't have this issue when I did the same thing from my iPod. Happened in Firefox btw.
Thanks for the update guys. It was indeed a long time, but it seems good so far :). I think you've successfully made every page useful for at least some people.
Stuff feels a little cramped now, but I don't know if that is representative or just me. I use Nosquint for Firefox to perma zoom out all websites to keep FF really minimal while I do other stuff - it can break things :)
Do you plan to roll out smaller updates, quicker from now on? You mentioned incremental updates in another comment.
I think advanced search would be useful. eg. tag search for drama + comedy.
Something to think about for show ratings. Now that user rating data is accessible, some interesting info would come from finding shows with the lowest/ highest episode averages, average show ratings that don't match average episode ratings, standout episodes with a large deviation, etc. Stats like that would be pretty fun :)
Thanks again. Hope you guys get some donations.
@carlinhosbraum This is something I miss too.
@Jakurdo Thanks for the feedback! We'll do our best to fit the needs of most of our users. We can't make them all happy :-)
@josbeir I understand why the acquired option has been removed and I'm personally not upset about it all. It just surprised me that episodes could still be in an "acquired" state, and suggested that the option could be implemented just in the bulk episode editor (where most users will probably never find it). Since the option hasn't been removed from the website (the state still exists), why not grant users a (backdoor) option to change an episode to an acquired state?
For a second I even thought the not skipped option replaced the acquired state (ie: Not skipped, just saving it for later). But I guess that's just the way to unskip a skipped episode.
A blog post on why we removed the acquired state will be made later. Please understand that the acquired state is a niche function that only appeals to a certain group of users. We need to find a way to make everyone happy.