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Home > Blogs > 3D Roadie > The latest AREA update

The latest AREA update

Posted by Shawn Hendriks, 31 May 2009 7:35 pm

Well the dust is finally settling and you can now wander around the newest iteration of the AREA.  We made a number of updates to both the skins you see and of course the underlying engine which you don't.  Over the next few weeks we will be tuning, fixing and adding features to finalize the site.  I know there are still bugs and oddities in the site so if you run across one please send it to us through the feedback button.  Don't forget to tell us what browser and OS you are running on.  If you need to be more detailed about you bug report please post to this thread here.. http://area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-3d-general/area-website-support-forum/latest-version-of-area-is-up/.

Also I appologize to those of you that recieved a bunch of forum subscription emails.  We didn't mean to spam you and we found the glitch causing it so you shouldn't be hearing any more from us on that. 

Currently NNTP and IRC are still offline but should be up shortly.

I whipped up a couple videos to show you a few of the new things about the AREA and here they are... ..

 

The new image uploading system.

Website customization

Heres the new Image Gallery viewer...

29 Comments

kurgan_dk

Posted 2 June 2009 9:11 pm

is it just me or is the white on green colour scheme on the blog rather tirering on the eyes?

I preferred the old colourscheme...

daliaswevon

Posted 2 June 2009 9:20 pm

A fantastic AREA update.
Nice improvements, and Cool new software section.

Longboarder1

Posted 2 June 2009 10:30 pm

kurgan_dk, I was thinkng the same thing...

Shawn Hendriks

Posted 3 June 2009 12:05 am

Glad you like it. There's more to come.

scorpion007

Posted 3 June 2009 2:14 am

Except we lost a week of posts on the forums. Couldn't you guys disable new posts during that period at least?

RedCobra

Posted 3 June 2009 8:22 am

LOVE IT!!

regi536

Posted 3 June 2009 11:16 am

Great but one more thing are your vids are working ( i mean showcase of vids)

Krippmeister

Posted 3 June 2009 11:25 am

Nice overhaul.
I was one of those "spammed" by the notification glitch, but no harm done. Keep up the good work!

Shawn Hendriks

Posted 3 June 2009 1:11 pm

Scorpion07, we even hid the forums on the AREA to prevent posting and put a big message on the homepage that we were in read only mode. Were you going through another route to post messages?

Shawn Hendriks

Posted 3 June 2009 1:36 pm

regi536 - is there some specific vids that are not working for you? could you describe your problem more? From what I can see here all the vids seem to be working

michele71

Posted 3 June 2009 7:56 pm

Big work Shawn! The navigation is much more pleasant and fast and new characteristic very much interesting especially the profile user. Good Idea the Theme color, filter category and the modality to insert new texture ecc . The discussion area is initially hard, but after a little time is all several fluid!
Good trick change the user profile to beginning post .
In total I like very much this change and now I am able to see all the site without problems (before much images were not loaded).
I expected several days curious to see the work finite and I are happy of yours work!!!
Bravo Shawn.

Shawn Hendriks

Posted 3 June 2009 8:52 pm

Hey everyone I just added another video to this post that covers the new image gallery viewer.

Pionier

Posted 3 June 2009 11:14 pm

yeah! finally some nice way to upload images!

really nice new AREA.

scorpion007

Posted 4 June 2009 2:21 am

@Shawn,

Yes, I have the SDK forum bookmarked and I go straight there. I only lost 1 post I think (this was before I saw the big notice), but I see that many others also made plenty of posts that were lost. I don't know what route they took.

Most forums, especially when they go for such a long maintenance, disable people's ability to post, if they know that posts would be lost. A message isn't enough, since people don't read. How hard would that have been?

taemoor

Posted 4 June 2009 12:15 pm

I dont know if its my browser(Firefox) or my OS(win64) but the "inconsistency" of Look n Feel of Buttons on Area's main page (default one), looks really odd, non professional and way below the normal standard. In the Main tab Raster, blurred (rather than antialiased) slices are being used. color & Font Size for buttons doesnt seem to follow a particular theme. I mean "behind the surface" does matter but truly and honestly previous UI was a great looking design. I think that this is an alpha update. We, as web designers and/or developers dont usually put such thing up there at this premature stage even for a small client. I think this place is a real estate of Autodesk and is part of its corporate Face and should have been taken care of from this angle as well. No offense to anyone(the PHDs in UI etc). Thats just the first impression I got this morning from my beloved forum..

spacefrog

Posted 4 June 2009 1:02 pm

if have to say that i mostly agree with taemoor

may i add some additional concrete critics:
- search in discussions (only thin i ever use... ) seems broken ?
- bad design to have the number of posts a thread contains sit far off to the right. This causes major eye movement when quick-reading over the threadlist. This is bad and causes major motivation-drop on my side.
It hinders me while looking for interesting discussions going on and urge me to leave the site...

spacefrog

Posted 4 June 2009 1:04 pm

well ...
and comment editing previously worked and now it doesn't anymore ?

how could anyone in charge decide that this step back featurewise is acceptable and give the okay for release?

scorpion007

Posted 4 June 2009 1:18 pm

The other problem is that the threadlist no longer says who was the last poster in a topic. It used to. I want it back.

Oh, and add a space after the comma in the date format: "1 June,2009"

Shawn Hendriks

Posted 4 June 2009 1:26 pm

@Scorpion007 I agree it would have been nice to an I would have preferred shutting down the posting entirely but the old system had no way to disable forum posting by itself so we did the best we could on short notice and simply disabled what we could tried to hide what we couldn't and put up a notification. If we had realized earlier we would be down that long we would have coded a way to lock everything down ahead of time.

spacefrog

Posted 4 June 2009 1:34 pm

just to add a positive to:

thumbs up for the breadcrumps - absolut necessity which was previously missing ;-)

JoyVoltenburg

Posted 4 June 2009 5:34 pm

what happened to the professional instructors section?

richard FX

Posted 7 June 2009 5:02 am

forget it,
you move to the profile section
good.

didom

Posted 7 June 2009 9:21 am

The design of the page is horrible

Elgyn

Posted 9 June 2009 5:20 pm

The new Area is terrible! It used to be much more classy.

vontinker

Posted 10 June 2009 7:10 pm

where is search?

Lea/o

Posted 12 June 2009 7:22 pm

Please, put a SEARCH...................

A-nasher

Posted 8 July 2009 4:50 am

so
it is hard to make a second first imprison even in the internet... when this darn area.com was lunching I subscribe to it but you Denied me. fine now I am real 3d TD and I hope someone can reach the CGI heights I step on! alas!
To view my Highend Careers profile, please visit this link:
http://www.highendcareers.com/jsprofile.aspx?j=7c94f474a4&spi=0


Abdullah Nasher
king of the out-rays

A-nasher

Posted 9 July 2009 1:04 pm

I am happy to tell you that this site is for hack artists and mediocres!

A-nasher

Posted 9 July 2009 1:11 pm

so
you will never gain any respect from real CGI creative...
let my wrath be on you!

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