Discussion and Feedback on the March 9th 2012 Release

Forum attachments seem to fail randomly, sometimes you get the images, sometimes you get 0-bytes files (browser launches "save or use some app" saying they are 20 bytes, but they end being 0).

I'm still having the same problem too!!! A lot of picture on my shop are deformed! I sent a e-mail today at the customer service and they asked me to send a screen - picture of my shop page so they are able to see the problem!!! So, customer service don't know about this issue??? This is weird!!
Why it take so long to fix this issue? And why all the pictures showed on the STAFF PICKS list are normal??? Just because they are on the home page?

Please try to fix this very soon! Pictures showed in this way are very ugly!

Hey guys, I can assure you the devs are aware of the image sizing issue, and are handling the issues as swiftly as they can.

Thanks Youknowwho4eva!
I know that Dev. and Cust. Service team are great, we are just a little bit frustrated.
As you said, we hope they can fix everything as soon as possible.
Dario

I'm really sorry that the image issue (both on the forums and the sizing of images in the different views around the site) has taken us so long to fix! We are still working on it and I should have an update tomorrow on both issues.

Thanks bdickason!
This is good to hear it
Dario

Please take also a look on the picture choosen for the gallery. You don't take the picture marked by the user. It seems that you take the first uploaded picture available.

And now for something completly different:
You should consider to define some key users (shop owners) as beta testers when doing major upgrades.
Based on the experiences gained through the last years:
- there are always a lot of major bugs
- some changes are often a real pitty for shop owners
- there are so many bugs and problems listed that many aren't changed for a long time and early corrections sometimes deal with minor ones
- sometimes I dout that there's anyone in this team really working with a shop. Some workflows would have never happened with a shop owner embedded in your test team
- with a test server (accessible by these key users) you would get rid of such problems before making it public

Maybe that can help to get rid of the most annoying things very soon.

By the way: I like the new layout/Designs.

Woody64

Thanks Woody64, I absolutely, completely agree with you We've actually created the exact beta group you've described with this release and they are helping us going forward. In the future, we'll be going through a nice beta period for each major release with a small group of users, all of which have very active shops We've started running a beta server which is running a more advanced release than the current live version and we will send periodic e-mails as we prep future releases.

The change may not be immediately apparent, but we are working to get better at testing our releases both internally as well as with our community.

(p.s. I'll look into your photo issue now).

...about those "stretched thumbnails"

roadrunner.css (line 2681 ff) says...

.product-img img, .shop-img img {width: 135px; height: 101px;}

This part of the code resizes all thumbnail pics to 135 x 101 pixel, whatever their width/height ratio might be.


What's about something like...

div.product-img img {
max-width: 135px !important;
max-height: 101px !important;
height: auto !important;
width: auto !important;
}

div.product-img {
text-align: center !important;
}

...instead ?
(My apologies for all those "important" tags, I need them to override the roadrunner stylesheet.)


Woody's "fixed" shop (screenshot):

(clickable thumbail)

Fovea3d's "fixed" shop (screenshot):

(clickable thumbail)

Thats it !
Beautiful,
Thank you.

Yeah that does the job. And it's that easy!
Woody64

Hi guys,

I know you're eagerly awaiting another update. Without further ado, the following fixes are now live:

* Sake Set & Light Poem Creator not working - Resolved
* Forum images not loading - Resolved
* Product images getting stretched in search results and the gallery - Resolved
* Product image thumbnails are the default image - Resolved. The thumbnails that appear in search results and gallery are now the images which you set to as default images.
* When visiting the forums page you would be logged out - Resolved

Thanks again for your patience. We're still slogging through the issues, but we're getting there.

Cheers,
Ana

Hi Ana,
Thanks, this is great! Just checked and all my picture are ok, just one piece is showing the SHAPEWAYS default render instead of the picture, but I will try to change it later.

Thanks again for your update

Cheers
Dario

This is really great. None of my pictures are stretched or deformed. Thanks guys for the hard work.

However, some of my wider images are still being cropped from the right side and they are not resized to fit the frame in the model gallery. The odd thing is taller pictures are resized correctly, though.

Also, on the model page itself all the default pictures are resized correctly to fit the frame, including the wider pictures which experienced cropping problems in the gallery page. They are still aligned to the top of the frame instead of being aligned centrally, though.
However, the subsequent pictures are all not resized. All of them are cropped from the right, similar to the gallery page problem.

The odd thing is once I clicked a second picture and went back to viewing the first default picture, the default pic will revert back to its larger size and be cropped just like the others.

So I guess can we have the pictures all aligned vertically and horizontally centered to the frame, and all of them be resized accordingly? Both on the model and gallery pages? Wide images are more susceptible to that problem.

Excellent progress guys, keep it up. Bugs are getting squashed day by day!

Ariel

Hey Ariel - First off thank you very much for the compliments. Our team appreciates them greatly.

I've heard (or rather read) everything you said and this is something we're working on researching and making available in the near future. We want to make sure we provide the very best solution for everyone so be assured that we hear what you are saying and we are working on it : )

Thanks again!

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before or not:

Some of my model names have an umlaut, e.g. "Round Möbius Strip (Large)". I think at the last update, the ö broke, replaced by two letters which appeared to be something like an A and the paragraph symbol (on my system at least). I just went to update the names, to fix them by putting in the umlaut again. Now the models are all listed on my shop with no name at all. Here's an example:

https://www.shapeways.com/model/325754/.html

What browser are you using? What operating system?

I can see the umlats on that model just fine.. I'm using Win7/IE9

On the model page, yes, but notice that the url has an empty string where the name should be. Sorry, I didn't make this very clear! On my shop, you should see that the first item has no name:

https://www.shapeways.com/shops/henryseg

Thanks for the kind words Ariel!! The dev team has been working really hard to crank out daily fixes and I'm glad it shows

As for the main product images... we're dealing with a very annoying problem that I'll try to explain:
We previously had a client-side resizing script (javascript) that would read the image information, resize it to fit the product detail size nicely, and display it. This caused a 1-3 second white 'flicker' for every user who viewed the image.

With our new release, we tried to get rid of as many of these hacks as possible.

We are developing a server-side solution that will resize and letterbox images properly (and eventually enable to you to crop them on the site!!!), but until then we are forced to resize large images based on height.

In the short term, to remove any stretching of images, there will be some whitespace above or below an image based on its aspect ratio. As there is no CSS Vertical Align property on images, some images will be stuck to the top of the product detail page for the time being, as you can see here:
https://www.shapeways.com/model/297314/badbabebot-head-revisi on-2-0.html

Once the permanent solution is live, this product will look like this:
https://i44.tinypic.com/2r78sjt.png

I'm glad to hear (well, read) that.

Wait... why not ?
Images are inline elements, pos ?


(clickable thumbail)

No Photoshop, just the Stylish-Addon for Firefox.


Step 1: auto-resizing

div.slideshow-big-img-container img {
max-width: 640px !important;
max-height: 476px !important
width: auto !important;
height: auto !important;
vertical-align: middle !important;
}

Step 2: "vertical-align" is NOT relative to the HEIGHT of the parent element

div.slideshow-big-img-container center {
line-height: 476px !important;
}

I didn't check the crossbrowser compability, but in Firefox it works very well.