Introducing shadows!
We’ve just completed some fairly major upgrades to ThatsMyMouse. Refresh this page if you don’t see the updates active in the application.
After observing the use of TMM on some large sites, we noticed that when there were a significant number of avatars on a page, the display became quite confusing. In an effort to combat that, we’ve now added a couple of new features.
Idle State
When someone doesn’t perform an action on a page for 30 seconds, their avatar will enter an idle state. The idle state has several functions;
1) The avatar will become slightly more transparent and appear below all active avatars
2) The avatar will display a “zzz” sleeping icon
3) The person’s name will appear lower in the list of users on the page
Shadows
All avatars and interface components now feature shadows that drop onto the page below them. This significantly helps to distinguish the avatars from the page content. It also looks really cool :) It works on all supported browsers with the exception of Internet Explorer 6. If you don’t like this effect you can turn the shadows off the settings menu.
As part of this upgrade, we’ve also started to introduce a new rendering technique on the interface called css sprites. This significantly helps to reduce page load time and allows us to use more detailed images in the interface.
If you notice any errors as a result of the upgrade, please let us know in the comments of this blog post. Enjoy.
