Pikchur.Dev.Blog

As you may or may not have noticed, last night we pushed a new version of Pikchur with an enchanced UI and revamped homepage. Of course this is just some of what we’ve been working on so here is the full feature list for anyone who cares to read on ;-)

Design/UI

Homepage (http://pikchur.com)

This page has been completely re-designed to give us a more simplistic to the point look. Our previous page had to much going on and we didn’t want to overwhelm newcomers ;-)

All pages (e.g http://pikchur.com/timeline)

A side menu can be found on all pages, this improves overall site navigation.

Dashboard (http://pikchur.com/dashboard)

We scrapped the tab based navigation and moved to a side menu. It’s a lot nicer and also allows you to find stuff you need quicker. We also consolidated the

We also removed the constant upload section that appeared on top of the dashboard pages and moved it to it’s own page. This allows us to display a lot more content on the page and push everything up a bit so you guys gain a lot more real estate.

Pikchur landing Page (e.g http://pikchur.com/CYG)

This page also has a side navigation menu and streamline views for sharing,feeds,and trackbacks. You will also notice two additional menu items if you are a Pikchur pro member. Statistics, and Original Size. More on these two later in the post.

Header and Footer

These are pretty minor and probably not worth noting, but the header on all pages changed as well as the footer. The header is significantly smaller than what we had before, and again allows for more info to be displayed on the page.

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Functionality

Pro Accounts

We added the ability to purchase a Pikchur pro account. A full list of features can be found here: http://pikchur.com/upgrade

Twitter Oauth and Facebook Connect

This update was really overdue, but basically it makes connecting your Twitter and facebook accounts a breeze. For Twitter it also means a more secure experience, you never have to share your password with us ever again ;-)

Backend Tweaks

This might be boring stuff to you, but it gets us really excited anytime we optimize our image propogation, mail, MMS and backend processes. We won’t go in to to much detail here but lets just say our services are purring like a fine fed kitteh cat!

We hope you enjoy the cha cha changes and as always your feedback is welcomed!

~The Pikchur Crew

Hey guys,

Sorry for the down time, but we assure you it’ll be worth it.  We are very excited to anounce our next release of Pikchur.

You should notice alot of cool new features as well as a completely redesigned user experience.

It should only take a few minutes, so bare with us.

We’ll post a full list of features and updates later on, but we are pretty sure you’ll figure everything out.

For now, please take the time to view this “very” important public service anouncment from He-man & Shira.

Thanks and Happy Pikking!

The Pikchur Crew

So I bet you guys are wondering what we actually do here @ Pikchur besides drink beer and watch Diggnation? Well, we eat cake, oh and release features from time to time.

Some of these delightful treats include

• Friends / Followers
• Edit Pik Data
• Activity Stream, a stream of activities of you and the people you follow (Piks, Follows, Comments). The Activity Stream can be found in your dashboard. :)
• Upgraded comment system.
• Optimized API
• Optimized Pikchur Message Queueing System
• And much more (you’ll just have to look closely)

….

Here is a more detailed look at some of the features from the list:

Friends / Followers / Activity Streams

You can now follow and have people follow you back on Pikchur.

Follow your friends Public Pikchur activity, Piks, comments, and new followings.

We also made our comments a lot smarter! Now when you leave a comment on a Pikchur, a link back is included  as well as the option of embedded @’s to services that don’t support threaded conversations (or have limited support for them). This eliminates out of context status updates.

So for example , I send a pik, (@Orical) and you leave a comment of “Nice pik”, we will, if enabled add the @Orical Nice Pik <link back>  to your outgoing comment. This pretty much  eliminates all out of context conversations.

….

There are a bunch of more features we just added, so come join us!

~The Pikchur Crew

Peter & Emmanuel

Hey guys, we made this snazzy little vid on Seesmic. Come say hi! :)

Link to Seesmic landing page: http://seesmic.com/videos/H61MuQ12rx

~Peter & Emmanuel

We here at Pikchur love jQuery and we figured we’d write a short summary of the new features included in jQuery UI 1.7. It’s full of updates, upgrades and uptomization optomizations.

So what’s new?

• Backward compatability! : Well one of the biggest things is the backwards compatability with jQuery 1.3, yes thats right you can upgrade to 1.7 and benifit from all the goodness and speed boosting gremlins, quickly and easily.

• Revamped and optimized plugins  : In addition to making all sorts of bug fixes, the jQuery team optimized all of there plugins. With the promise of cleaner code, faster proccess, and more options.

• ThemeRoller V2 + CSS Framework : These two updates have to be my favorite, as a developer I love to geek out over these sorts of things, and well the new openness of the CSS framework and the cool things you can do with the ThemeRoller, make me feel all tingley inside. Err what I mean is that the new CSS framwork update not only supports the standard jQuery UI plugins, but also custom made ones. Opening up a door of possibilities that makes even the most reserved developer dance with joy. Oh and of course ThemeRoller, which has been built to work in conjunction with the new CSS Framework.

Along with a a buch of other updates such as offline documentation, new demos, a revamped website ( http://ui.jquery.com/ ), and a dedicated blog, (http://blog.jqueryui.com/) its no wonder jQuery is always ahead of the game.

~Peter

So we clawed, and scrapped our way to the finals in one of the categories for the SXSW web awards! Isn’t that great? We are super psyched, and truly honored to have been nominated for an award of this caliber.

Check out the complete list: http://sxsw.com/interactive/web_awards/finalists

You’ll find us under the “mobile” category, along with some other really cool sites, including one name you guys might have heard a little bit about .. :-)

Thanks to everyone who has helped support us, we really appreciate it. Thanks to our users for providing feedback and enabling us to make a better service. Wow, this sounds like an acceptance speech, so we’ll stop right here..

We hope to see a bunch of you at SXSW! Keep bringing the awesomeness!

~The Pikchur Crew

Hey guys sorry for the inconvenience, but it seems that Twitter is having some DNS issues. This means that for the time being we cannot send Piks or authenticate with Twitter.

We will notify you as soon as everything is resolved :)

~The Pikchur Crew

Although the weather wasn’t great, the interview with Luckystartups went really well. Yeah, there are things we could have improved on, but overall it wasn’t bad for our first live interview.

We have are seat-belts fastened, and are ready to move on with the next major update to the site. In addition we will have a nice little surprise coming shortly for those of you who have iPhones. Thanks to all who gave us feedback and suggestions, we are definitely taking them in to account as we move along. 

Of course if anyone has any other suggestions,comments, or just wants to say hi, we are on getsatisfaction and twitter. Feel free to drop us a line :-)

Happy Piking!

Come join @JewGoneWild and my self (@Orical) tonight @ 6pm EST while we do a Live interview with LuckyStartups.

About

How do you describe a show like lucky…

It’s like spring after a long winter, flowers in bloom.. errr wait I digress..

Luckystartups is a show that interviews any and all startups as well as people who are in the industry. It allows for users to communicate and ask questions live.

If that wasn’t enough LuckyStartups is hosted by two extremely  charismatic people, (Aronado Placencia and Dennis Lankes) whose on screen chemestry bring the show up from a 10 out of 10 to a cool 20 on the Pikchur Startup Interview Show Scale (PSISS, for short).

Now that you know what LuckyStartups is, and we are assuming you know what Pikchur is, please feel free to join us tonight with your questions, ideas, and feedback we will be glad to answer any and all questions (well as long as you don’t ask why the goat is in our office we’re good).

Hope to see you there!

~The Pikchur Crew

These updates are complete ….

As you can see we are down for a few minutes while we do some critical updates.

The majority of these fixes have to do with the styling of the site ( CSS ) and some inconsistencies that were occuring on certain browsers and platforms.

All in all this will be a nice little patch, and we will continue burning the 2am oil for our next release, which will be way cooler than this Zzzzzing one.

Following up on a new tradition, we will now drop some knowledge: