jducoeur

Time for a quick survey.

Background

A lot of my time and attention at the moment is being spent on Photos in Querki. It turns out, as I go through my Use Cases, that Photos aren't just a nice-to-have -- the ability to add Photos as a first-class data type, easily, in a controlled way, is one of Querki's real power features, and I'm finding that almost every Use Case wants them. So I'm spending a bunch of time this month improving their UX.

I finally realized yesterday that the existing Photo mechanism is still a bit too hard to program. Specifically, if you simply say [[My List of Photos]], it shows you all of the photos, full-sized, running down the page erratically -- what you asked for, but almost never what you actually *want*. I believe the right answer here is to default to showing a "carousel" -- a single window showing one photo, with buttons allowing you to scroll through them. This seems to be the consensus approach on the Web these days. (It will still be possible to display your photos in other ways, but as usual for Querki, I want the default behavior to typically be a good answer.)

The Question

Which brings us to the question. Bootstrap's Carousel mechanism leans towards being animated -- sliding from one picture to the next, automatically, every five seconds, basically as a slide show. Personally, I actually find that a little annoying: I prefer to flip through these things at my own pace. I don't know whether I'm just being weird, though, so let's gather at least a *little* data to decide the default.

Assume that I will eventually put this under the Space owner's control; I just want to decide what happens by default.
[Poll #2011496]

Okay, here's an odd-sounding question for all those of you who use SMS, aka text messaging from your phone -- specifically, those who have ordinary cell phones with normal number pads, not full keyboards. (Those of us with Treos are assumed to not be the usual case.)

We're trying to come up with a concise and easy-to-type SMS syntax -- which means I need to check out what's actually easy to type. So I'd like to know what's under your buttons. If you could take a minute or two to look at your phone and answer this, I'd appreciate it.

I think of the "common" mobile-phone letter layout as being:

• 2: abc


• 3: def


• 4: ghi


• 5: jkl


• 6: mno


• 7: pqrs


• 8: tuv


• 9: wxyz

[Poll #1089759]

As Zingdom has turned into a genuine startup over the past month, I've been reflecting on the nature of the game. One thing that has been surprising me in the past few years has been the realization that most people don't seem to share my fondness for the idea.

I mean, there's a lot that I love about tiny startups. There's no bureaucracy to speak of, and each person makes a huge difference. You know everybody in the company, and you can have a great deal of influence if you try. If it's well-run, salary and benefits are generally quite solid. They're usually hanging way out over the bleeding edge technically. And there's usually at least an outside chance of changing the world, and getting rich off the lottery tickets they call "options".

Of course, there are arguably some downsides. Job security is more or less zero: on any given day, you might discover that the company no longer exists. You really can't slack off for any serious period of time, because everyone matters, and the team had better all be grownups or you have a recipe for disaster. You have to be quite disciplined personally, and responsible for yourself, because big brother isn't prodding you in appropriate directions. The hours can get out of hand, although a good company won't demand that too often.

I find myself curious about what people think about this, so it's time for a completely unscientific poll!
[Poll #1078096]

For a project I'm doing, it occurred to me that a quick poll might be useful. Could you take a second to answer the following? Thanks!

[Poll #1066016]

A couple of times in recent weeks, I've gotten into discussions about Battlestar Galactica, and specifically whether the show had particularly good or bad characterization. This makes me curious about what people think on the subject, so I shall assuage my curiosity in the tried and true LJ fashion: let's have a poll!

This poll is intended for people who have watched a fair amount of BSG. If you haven't watched at least half a season worth, just skip right over it. Note that there are two distinct questions here; they're related, but please think about them separately. This is strictly focused on the characters -- for purposes of this poll, disregard questions of plot, plausibility of the scenario, and so on. Feel free to add further opinions in comments.

[Poll #892555]