Site Upgrade Ideas

1. A way to combine cursors sets that consists of the same design, but different colors.

Here is a mock-up that I have made of what the site might look like with a multiple-color friendly set.

It consists of tabs alongside the edge of the cursor previews. Clicking a tab changes to the color variant, and a download button for that specific color appears. (A better placement of that download button would probably be below the ad though.)

The main download button still exists. Clicking it however, downloads a .zip file that has all the color variants inside it. Each variant is in its own folder however, with its own "cursor change tool" file inside the folder as well. The new download buttons act like the old one, downloading just the single cursor set that is viewable by the tab.

2. A way for users to share cursors that they find on other sites without uploading them into the RealWorld Gallery.

We all find sets on other sites that we'd like to share. The only way to really do this however, is by uploading them ourselves.

Unoriginal work is not really desireable in the gallery, we like to see your work in there. Currently unoriginal work is removed from the gallery main page, but it would be nice to have a separate location for it altogether. I imagine a tab added to the site that would be specifically for sharing links to other cursors found elsewhere. Perhaps the page could even be "smart" enough to scan the link and extract thumbnails for a sort of preview of what is underneath, sort of like how Facebook gives link previews and allows you to choose the thumbnail shown. This owuld of course have to be moderated to prevent unrelated links/content. That is what the "Users" tab is for.

3. A Gallery sub-section for animated images.

I believe the site does support the uploading of animated images created with RealWorld software. However, it's not clear where. The gallery contains sub-sections for cursors and icons, why not for animations too? (And in addition, we need to get some interested artists together to start populating the gallery with these.)

5. Cursor/icon gallery thumbnails.

Sometimes the automatic thumbnail creator on the site deosn't pick the cursors or icons out of your set that make it look the best. What if you could pick which cursors/icons were featured in the thumbnail and arrange them in it how you liked? I imagine clicking a "create thumbnail" link where you can select three cursors from your set and then drag and drop them into a "thumbnail square" to arrange them how you like.

6. Higher DPI cursor previews.

With RealWorld Cursor Editor's new feature that allows for higher DPI cursors, it would be nice to be able to see them. Perhaps this oculd be like the icons are. You don't see them size variants unless you click on the specific cursor and then you see the different sizes available.

This is juse a blog post for ideas that I think would be nice. There's no guarantee that Vlasta will implement them, they're just thoughts. What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? What else would be nice on the site?

ElectricumViridis registered user on March 16th 2012

these are all very good ideas, the only change that i would add is the messages. it's hard to find out what someone is talking about when you have to look through all your messages to find what you sent them,

Vlasta site administrator on March 17th 2012

All these are good ideas and I hope some of them will eventually be implemented.

I guess I should explain a bit about #4. My original plan was to have a unified style for all user icons, something that would work like this. People would be able to compose an icon by choosing one of available graphics for eyes, mouths, ears, haircuts, skin tones, etc. But... as always, there was not enough time to implement this and so all users have the picture that was intended for anonymous posts. Another option would be to use a scaled down profile picture, but only few people have uploaded a real photo and each of them has different background, relative head size or brightness. All solutions have their drawbacks.

JDDellGuy contributing user on March 18th 2012

I like the idea for the scaled down profile picture. Perhaps you could just make it a requirement that profile picures must be square. If not, the site does not accept them. There could be a hint on how to use the RealWorld tools to crop a picture into a square. People would quickly figure out on their own, that in order for the scaled down picture to look good, they should make the main profile picture of themselves have a larger face, in other words, that they should make up most of the image, not background, etc.

People who do not upload a profile picture will simply have the default one. With the usage of these, profile pictures should become more common because people will see others using them.

jojois74 registered user on March 18th 2012

Or, it could be like G-mail where whatever pic you upload, you have to choose an area of it in the shape of a square.

sixλxis forum moderator on April 2nd 2012

^^^ Agree completely

Virum64 registered user on April 26th 2012

That's really a good idea. When we create a set which is available in several colors, we get a huge cursor set and it's not very practical.
For example, I uploaded a Tetris cursor set which is available in 6 colours.
15 cursor functions x 6 colors = 90 cursors °_°"

SYNTHCRѺ contributing user on July 25th 2012

These ideas are all really good I particularly like the 5th one. I was thinking the same thing the other day that there should be a way to pick which 3 cursors/icons are used in the thumbnail. You have some really good ideas.

-SYNTHCRO

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