BookJetty: Book Listing Variants, Cover View and More…

MON, 25 JUN 2007

View type optionsBookJetty now supports four different views, i.e. library view, default view, cover view, and simple view.

I have also re-designed the display of the book attributes, less important attributes like ISBN is now moved to the tooltip area, while pricing information has also been removed from the listing area, since they are not referred often.

The labels have also been removed, since we all know what they are by just looking at the values, and the screen now looks much cleaner and less cluttered. Yay!

A quick look at the old design:

Previous List

And here is the new design:

Library View

Library View

Bookmarks will also be shown for Amazon search result, so that you will know immediately if that book is a popular book in BookJetty. They are shown as a total sum, instead of split into read, reading, read in previous design. It’s easier to look at one value as compared to three different values.

The bookmark status, i.e. Read, Reading and Wanted are now tagged with colours, blue, magenta and green respectively, with the colours, they are easier to be identified with.

Default View

Default View

Default view does not query the library information, because some of BookJetty users are not library users, and we to refer to the library call numbers when we need to borrow books from the library. Other than that, it’s nice to be able to turn it off.

Cover View

Cover ViewSometimes it’s just nicer to look at the book covers, you know what I mean, just like this cover. :) The rest of the attributes are moved to the tooltip area.

Simple View

Simple View

For those who are busy, a quick reference to your book list without bothering the rest of of the details, book attributes are moved to the tooltip area as well. If you are viewing your book list, it will list 15 books per page instead of 10.

Change of the view type will be stored in the cookie, so the subsquent search results will follow your last selected listing type.

Coming next to BookJetty will be the long missing feature, the book reviews and ratings feature. And I can’t wait for that, probably will stick to the 5-star ratings, after considering the good points and bad points of 4-star and digg-style ratings.

BookJetty
9 Comments . Comments Feed . Trackback URI
Mon, 25 Jun 07 01:39 pm . Joe Goh wrote:

Nice redesign, looks really Mac-inspired as it reminds me of the new Finder in Mac OS X Leopard with Cover Flow.

When are you going to be getting a Mac Herry? ;-)

Mon, 25 Jun 07 01:41 pm . Miccheng wrote:

Very cool! Perhaps a FAQ page to describe what the different elements mean (library view). eg. Italics text means type of book. Publisher name is after the italics text.

Hee hee… perhaps use SharedCopy to do this?

Mon, 25 Jun 07 01:31 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

Hehe…thanks Joe…ya…hopefully soon…Anyone would love to donate their Mac? :D

Mon, 25 Jun 07 01:14 pm . Joe Goh wrote:

Here’s the new Finder i’m talking about: http://www.apple.com/macosx/leopard/features/finder.html

If you can find a way to dynamically generate reflections for the book covers in BookJetty, that’ll be awesome. :-)

Mon, 25 Jun 07 02:36 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

There’s a way to do it with Reflection javascript:
http://cow.neondragon.net/stuff/reflection/

But it can mess up your layout, I tried to do it for the book covers scroll, and it messed up the scroller. And the other draw back is, it’s gonna take up additional space for the reflection, you can’t put text on top of it. :)

Mon, 25 Jun 07 02:53 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

@Miccheng I think I’ll wait for questions from the users, see if they are frequent or not, from before putting in FAQ. Hehe…Thanks anyway. :)

Sun, 1 Jul 07 09:51 pm . Jamieson teo wrote:

Any chance you can add the class=reflect to the img tag of your widget thumbnails?

Mon, 2 Jul 07 08:45 pm . Jamieson teo wrote:

I was just thinking, wouldn’t it be good to insert a optional class parameter in the widget (sorry i’m posting here, can’t post at the widget page). Something like bj_img_class = something . That way we can apply our own CSS to the thumbnails. From my page which I’ve loaded the widget, it’ll look great with the reflect function. On article pages I’ve loaded your widget as a vertical so I won’t by using the reflect function but can nonetheless use something else if I choose to. What do you think Herry?

Mon, 2 Jul 07 10:16 pm . Herryanto Siatono wrote:

My concern is that the widget form is getting cluttered with so many parameters, and class name may not make sense for those who know nothing about CSS.

But, yet I think I’ll still add the variable in, but will not put it in the form yet, so those who need it can still use it.

Will let you know when it’s up. :)

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