Report and Review

So far I'm making more panels for my visual synthesiser and ironing out the kinks of the "canvas" area. I've decided to name it Temporal Paint because it acts like a paint program that has animatable and manipulable lines and shapes.

There's been some coding difficulties in terms of synchronisation with the preview movieclip as the preview movieclip needs to have the same properties altered only in a much more immediate way. This causes the preview to look odd when changing values of say, spin or rotation.

I've also decided I'm going to have multiple tools, including: a paintbrush tool (draw shapes repetitively and smoothly) and an eraser tool (erase a radius of shapes according to current shape size - still working out the code for that).

As for the review today I've decided to do something a little different. It's a website we are all probably familiar with - eBay.com

For the purposes of this review I will be looking at the GUI of the Australian version of eBay (http://www.ebay.com.au).

As soon as you load eBay you're met with, well, stuff. There's so much stuff, in fact, that it is difficult to find exactly where you want to go unless you're familiar with the site. In terms of learnability, eBay doesn't exactly ease you in. A registration link for new users is easily overlooked (it's on the right side of the page in an area you're almost expecting to be an advertisement). In fact, the advertisements are very large on the eBay homepage which does hinder its immediacy as it pushes the most important links (login and register) to the side.

Those qualms aside, eBay has a lot of links. The problem is - and this could be quite pedantic on my part - that there is little to no rollover feedback to give you some idea about what you might be clicking on (more of a problem in the "Be Inspired" area).

When it comes to product searching, eBay seems to order results quite orderly. In fact, you can choose to view results in a list, a "gallery" and "window shopping" in a small drop-down box up the top of the results box. For the most part, list works well enough, though all options are plagued with what seems to be a Web 2.0 trend - popup javascript "bubbles" that show you a slightly larger version of the thumbnail when you hover over. This would work well if it didn't pop up nigh instantly and usually by accident, covering content you might have been looking at. Plus a lot of the time it pops up with no larger image but simply a message saying "We're unable to display this image. Please try again" in a box far too big.

These issues aside, eBay has a reasonable interface. The problems start to arise with hyperlink saturation and advertisement placement. But these are somewhat understandable for a site that has been described as "the world's biggest garage sale".