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by habosa 4387 days ago
The design is great and this is a really nice way to display a travel album, but the experience is not there. I'm sure when testing over a local network this is fast but even over my 30mbps connection I had to wait a long time for all of the images to load. That's not normally a problem but the page seemed totally 'frozen' until about half of the pictures had loaded, and scrolling was full of jank until it was totally loaded.

Is there some way you could put placeholders in for the images while they load so that I can scroll around? If I wasn't waiting to see the demo specifically I would have assumed the page was broken and clicked out.
3 comments
ogig 4387 days ago
I think pretty much the same. I really like the design but the scroll sensation plus loading times on fetching is killing it.

As habosa suggests, use placeholders. Also you could prefetch images two scrolls away instead of one.

Another thing that i noticed is that right side navigation circles are linked to "chapter titles" instead of every page. It took me a while to figure out what was going on. It's a bit confusing.

Again, nice design, polish it.

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techwizrd 4387 days ago
I'm having the same issue. The images are taking a very long time to load which freezes scrolling (although I can still hover over the pips on the side). I don't know if the problems are due to HN's load or a weak server.

Either way, I really like the concept.

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huchenme 4386 days ago
The site is hosted on S3 and cloudfront right now. The poor performance might be because the page transaction and animations. My initial vision is display the album similar to a photo book, now seems nature scrolling might be more acceptable.
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habosa 4386 days ago
I, unlike some others, don't mind the paginated scrolling. I just think it would be good to be able to quickly flip through pages without delay just because the images are loading.

A good example would be a Facebook photo album. If I click the left arrow as fast as I can, the page keeps flipping instantly. Instead of seeing each picture, I see a small loading icon and a box where the picture will be. When I finally stop mashing the arrow, the picture I'm settled on will load.

I hope you don't find my comments overly critical. It's a beautiful design, just trying to be constructive.

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