Power to the Clothes of the People!

Notes taken on the backs of PNGs

We do have a well defined roadmap for the current development cycle that we intend to stick to, but sometimes, at those hours when you shouldn’t be working anyway, it’s fun to throw something to the wall, just to see if it sticks. For example, this is a little experiment, developed in the last few hours, still in need of much work but looking promising at the moment. We’ll see.

That’s the time passed between us reporting an issue with JPEGCam, the open-source Flash/JS combo we’re using to provide our photo booth functionality, and the release of version 1.08 that fixes it.

“Impressed” or “delighted” don’t even begin to explain how we are feeling right now towards jhuckaby, the developer of jpegcam. Thank you so much, sir.

Rock on:

• We put in place labels that should help you to quickly identify what your reaction was to any given item (if any) It’s only featured in one of the collections for the moment, and its design is a nod to an iconic tshirt design. We hope it’s well received.
• Some great feedback led to a quite dramatic change on the webcam upload page. We got rid of a lot of the cruft that was pushing the cam way below its right location. As a result of the makeover there are maybe too few elements in the page right now (lacking informational and help texts, mainly) but we want the chance to slowly re-introduce things shall the need appear.
• Another tiny big thing: the ‘upload’ button is no longer called that, after it was rightly pointed to us that ‘upload’ was a little to heavy on the machinespeak. The replacement text tries to show a little more spark.
• Lots of small fixes to the views
• We’re so glad the new ajax spinner has been very well received. Sadly, it’s still broken as I didn’t find the time to fix it alright.

After four days of (a small bunch of) “real users” uploading content to PeCo, we thought of composing a quick census of which shops and brands are represented on the site. Excuse the non optimal formatting:

[“Alain Afflelou”, “American Apparel”, “And&And”, “Bershka”, “Blanco”, “Burbujita”, “Camper”, “Carolina Herrera”, “Century 21”, “Coach”, “Colors”, “Cottet”, “DAY A DAY”, “Footlocker”, “Gawker Store”, “Glam”, “H&M”, “Hamilton”, “Hipercor”, “Insanely Great Tees”, “J Crew”, “JCrew”, “Juguettos”, “Kukuxumusu”, “La Compañia Fantastica”, “Lanikai”, “MUJI Tokyo”, “Milano”, “Motor City”, “Nevada”, “NewYorker”, “Nisses”, “Not remember”, “Oysho”, “Primark”, “Pull&Bear”, “Purificación García”, “Shibuya 109”, “Springfield”, “TOUS”, “The gretest”, “Threadless”, “Topatoco”, “Ulanka”, “Uniqlo”, “Vespa Roma”, “Zara”, “Zazzle”, “bimba & lola”, “buyvip”, “compañia fantastica”, “h&m”, “sociedadcilcista”]

Shops and brands are very powerful common facets upon which to explore and discover clothes, and we are very excited at the possibilities that are beginning to become apparent.

The wave keeps crashing ..

• Most importantly: the retooling of the webcam feature keeps humming along. Today we devised, designed and deployed our own approach to a ajax spinner. It’s a simple thing that aims to look cute and unique. It’s not fully working yet, but almost there.
• A bunch of other smaller fixes to the views.
• Content kept growing: expected items like tshirsts and jackets where joined today by new guests like bags, watches and belts. All are warmly welcome!
• Several very inspiring internal discussions and exchanges with friends, over phone and Skype, about what PeCo means, the inmediate future and what future directions it may take.
• I, all by myself, settled with “PeCo” as the official abbreviature for Peer Couture. I hope it gains consensus because we really need one ^_^

Having some friends over

Peer Couture UX team.

@calvin says: “el servicio de soporte de Peer Couture entendiendo su función de forma literal”

The ball keeps rolling ..

• We continued receiving a great deal of content, feedback and support from our peers at The Cocktail and an also great number of requests for invitations, which are completely flattering and will be satisfied as soon as the invitation infrastructure is on place.
• Our superdesigner Laura tweaked a little this tumblelog’s theme and made it quite more palatable.
• Laura and I outlined the main tasks for this development cycle on both design and front-end coding, including but not limited to: a clear strategy for browser support (pretty much anything post-IE6), designing the fallback pages for 404/500 erros and maintenance mode, strict and continuous web standards observance, etc.
• General bug-fixing (for example, vox populi items are now ordered as intended) and design-tweaking (for example, opinion buttons look a little more button-y now and their affordances should be clearer)
• Highlight of the day: the ‘photo booth’ experience has been retooled to avoid the most common ‘mistake’ by the users until the moment. It’s far from perfect (there a couple of glaring issues I could point to right now) but it hopefully is an improvement over the prior setup.