cscott
commented
10 years ago Subject: [Codex] Some early post hunt thoughts
From: C. Scott Ananian Date: Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 3:44 PM
And while you're thinking about the hunt, feel free to file bugs and feature requests for the hunt solving software at https://github.com/cjb/codex-blackboard/issues . No guarantees, since the software is largely developed in chris and my free time in December and January, but I'm always interested in ideas to make things work better. Already on my list: 1) making the software faster (client-side rendering was still pretty slow, especially if you had a lot of tabs open) 2) making the server restart process smoother 3) the "email to ringhuntersping@ to get information to your teammates while away on runarounds" seemed to be very convenient. I'm hoping to make that work even better next year: https://github.com/cjb/codex-blackboard/issues/122
--scott
From: Lopez Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 5:39 AM
The software was much better this year than last. Thanks. The "hide solved puzzles" really helped.
My wishes:
1) Don't load the full chat history immediately. Make it a request item, especially for the main page.
2) I was getting the simple spreadsheet view due to "heavy use" of spreadsheets on occasion. I wonder if this is because when people open the spreadsheet in a new window they have two connections -- the new window and the wiki window. If this is causing double counting, maybe opening the spreadsheet in a new window should close it in the existing window.
3) A more efficient use of space on the puzzle page would help (me). Issue: I can't see much room chat (so I need to pop it out) Issue: I can't see enough rows on the spreadsheet.
A large portion of the area next to the room chat seemed wasted. Can we push the chat up a bit?
Current layout (for comparison)
Main room chat Misc Controls
Lots of empty space Room Chat
Spreadsheet
Possible improvement:
Main room chat Misc | Room
Controls | Chat
Spreadsheet
I was almost always needing to pop out the room chat,
so maybe even:
Main room chat Misc | Room Controls | Chat =======================================| Spreadsheet |
|
Maybe even go one step further and give up the main room chat on the puzzle pages. I rarely looked at it and it was being updated on N tabs each time.
The year I hunted with sages, they had a google doc on each page. It worked very well for leaving brief notes about the puzzle status, what was tried, etc.
Room chat
Doc (~4 lines showing by default)
Spreadsheet
4) I there a way to open Google Spreadsheets with "Compact Controls" by default?
From: Martin DeMello Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 5:36 AM
agreed, it was lovely having the software (mostly!) just work, but one of my main frustrations, working on a laptop screen, was lack of vertical space to see the spreadsheet in. exacerbated by google's lack of a "turn all toolbars off" option. since displays tend to be wide and short these days, how about having the frame split the other way, i.e.
| main chat |
|---|
| room chat |
also something i will definitely get done by next year is a quick and easy way to copy a crossword into a google spreadsheet, since again the ui makes adding black squares, bars, etc pretty tedious.
martin
From: Lopez Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 6:05 AM
I think the following turns off all toolbars and headers in Google Spreadsheets: View: Compact Controls View: Full Screen
From: Dan Westerberg Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 10:55 AM
I agree with most of the above. I'm using chrome on a moderately sized laptop screen and my typical flow to start on a puzzle was to -click the puzzle link on the blackboard with open in new window -open the following links on the puzzle page and then close the puzzle page -the puzzle link (aliceshrugged.com...) -the spreadsheet, open in new tab -the chat popout (and then click view as tab, and move the tab into the window with the other two) -switch tabs a lot while solving and pay less attention to the chat than ideal. This system largely eliminated the difficulty of finding the intended tab when switching.
On one occasion I put one spreadsheet tab on a left window for crossword clues and a different spreadsheet tab on a right window for the crossword grid.
From: Alex C Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:14 AM
Dan's process was the same as my own, except that I was working with dual monitors and didn't need to tab back and forth so much.
I did have a constant issue with Chrome reporting that the codexian.uspages were slow to respond, causing a popup asking me if I wanted to kill the pages. I was still able to use the pages fine so I'm not sure what the problem was. But I had to move the error pop up out of the way as closing it became pointless--it would reappear 60 seconds later. I saw the same pop up on a few other screens over the hunt, so I'm probably not alone.
From: NickM Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:46 AM
I had the same problem as Alex when solving remotely. And when I tried using Internet Explorer instead of Chrome I would get a popup stating that the site was not responding due to a long-running script.
I noticed that the site seemed to get more sluggish as the chat logs became longer and also as the blackboard gained more content. Also, as others have reported, the blackboard was slow to render on my machine. I expect that implementing the "hide solved pages" option on the server rather than on the client side would solve this issue.
I also had issues with the Codexian server making multiple requests for my username/password at login (both on Chrome and IE).
In general, however, I felt that the hunt software worked far better under load than it did last year, when it seriously impeded remote solving. My thanks to everyone implementing these improvements!
Nick Mitchell
From: Mike Develin Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 11:48 AM
I was using the same process as Dan. I actually didn't find it so onerous. Chat server instability was the bigger bugaboo.
From: Danny Zhu Date: Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:49 PM
It might be useful to have a button for "Open all things in new windows" (puzzle, chat, spreadsheet) on the puzzle page, since I also found myself doing those things a lot manually. Also, the pop-out-chat link would always reuse the same window/tab, so it took an extra bit of work to have multiple chats open at once, which I sometimes wanted.
+1 to more compact layout on puzzle pages, especially with chats to the side of the spreadsheet.
Copied in from the ringhunters list, so they don't get lost.