Release Notes 2009-10-14

A Whiter Shade of Whirled

Greetings, citizens of Whirled! As you will have already noticed, today we made a major change to the Whirled user interface.

First, a little background on this; I've wanted to overhaul the Whirled UI for a long time, not least as it's been mostly unchanged for over a year and a half. I personally found many of its aspects frustrating and felt that it was limiting our ability to bring in new folks. We have a lot of exciting new things coming for Whirled and this is setting the groundwork for those.

Secondly, it's obviously going to take some getting used to. Please give this a bit of time before deciding whether you like it or not. It took us a while to get comfortable with it in internal testing.

This thread is for sensible and calm discussion of the change -- hysterical or pointless posts will be edited or deleted, so please play nicely! I know it's been a while since we made major changes, and that's exciting and scary! Expect more fun stuff soon and remember, we're still in beta!

The three major changes you'll see today are:


 * Whirled is white! We did this because I have long-felt that our black colour scheme is offputting. Browsing the web it's very rare you come across a black website. This is probably going to take the most getting used to, and there are some wrinkles that still need to be ironed out, but I hope you'll like the change once you've given it time.
 * The Flash client and chat now always remain on the left of the screen, with the 'web' parts of Whirled (Me, Stuff, etc.) appearing on the right hand side of the screen. This gives the Flash part of Whirled primacy in the user interface and avoids a anomalies of the previous system (scrollbars side by side, flash client bouncing right and then left, etc.) It's a little weird with the Flash client closed, but we'll be doing some stuff to address that in the future.
 * The Flash Client is always full-height, centering your room or game in the middle of the screen instead of scrunched up in the top-left (or right with a tab open!) before. We'll be giving you more control over the size of the room view in the future, but for now all rooms will be shown at 500 height. As a consequence, there's a lot of white space around the room on larger displays, and the need for the 'side bar' chat option has gone away.

Those are the big things, a list of details follows below:

Web changes:
 * New color scheme, with white background
 * New navigation tabs
 * New subnavigation bar (the links under the tabs)
 * Web content is now to the right of the Flash app
 * The Flash app always fills all available space
 * New Whirled logo

Flash app changes:
 * Rooms are scaled to have their height set to 500
 * The "zoom" functionality is temporarily suspended
 * Rooms and games are centered and given margins
 * "Side bar" chat has been removed
 * Notifications popup list toggle is now on the far right

Known issues:
 * Major glitches with some flash furni and videos in rooms will be fixed soon!
 * The bottom of the status panel (coins|bars|level) goes behind the navigation tabs if the window is narrower than about 900 pixels.
 * The notifications toggle doesn't line up right
 * White Scrollbars in the flash client do not have a 'top' to them
 * The highlight on 'chat waiting' is far too subtle, a new one will be along shortly.
 * Playlist text is white on white. Oops!

Unknown issues:
 * Maybe lots! Please post bug reports to , be sure and read first to avoid duplicate posts.

Thanks again,

- Cleaver