I just spent 20 minutes looking for the search bar

LATEST NEWS 22/05/2010: news.deviantart.com/article/11… (Official news article about V.7.) I'm a little disappointed at how belittling some of it is worded, but I'm willing to attribute it to stress or something.

Ah well, on to every-day life. Remember kids, V.7 is riddled with bugs. The best way to deal with them is to report them to the helpdesk.

/EDIT


YET ANOTHER EDIT: People keep asking where they can find the search bar, so I made you guys a nifty list of where you need to go to search for what (used to be that you could search for anything and everything on every single page, but I guess that wasn't progressive enough).

Searching Deviations: www.deviantart.com/ (DA Home page)
Searching Journals: today.deviantart.com/ (Today page)
Searching News: news.deviantart.com/browse/fro… (News page)
Searching Groups: groups.deviantart.com/ (Groups page)

Searching galleries: Go to a random person's gallery and the search bar will be right there.

Searching journal histories: Go to a random person's profile and click "journal". You can search their journal history from there.

MIA:
Chat search
Forum search
Collections search

/EDIT



More edits below...


ANOTHER EDIT: Guys, it seems that V.7 experiences quite a few bugs when you try to view a Deviation. Artist's Descriptions fail to load properly, full-views look blurry, etc. I found that most of these bugs can be "solved" by refreshing. However, doing this seems to "break" the new arrow-buttons feature which lets you scroll through galleries.

Also, please check out this spyed.deviantart.com/journal/3… (journal) on the V.7 update status.

Over and out!

PS. More edits down below.

/EDIT




So I wake up this morning to find that DeviantART has switched to V.7. You can find the news.deviantart.com/article/11… (triumphant announcement here).

Now we all knew it was coming. Heck, the beta-testers among us even knew what it would look like. But still there are some surprises. Some of them are unpleasant, while others are not.


I'm in no mood to write a rant-journal, so I'm not going to do that. Instead I'll note some observations and points which could use improvement in my opinion. In fact, let's make a list together, shall we? If you see anything missing from my list, feel free to drop me a comment.


Here we go:

I'd like to have the search bar back on every page. Searching has become cumbersome now (you have to go to dA's home page first), and to the best of my knowledge having a search bar on every page is common practice in internet-land anyway. RESOLVED (somewhat): the search bar is now available in the stick menu (click the arrow next to dA's logo).

Messages in your message centre and Deviations in your watch centre are not the same thing. So when you log in, the header should list them separately. Personally, I'd also like to have my group messages listed separately, because they are not part of my regular message centre. If I don't see them listed separately, I might forget to check them. RESOLVED (somewhat): You can now "splinter" your messages. Hover over your message-number in the header and the option to splinter will pop up. Note that Group Messages are still not listed, but this is a good step forwards.

While the dropdown menus do a lot to make the site sleeker, I don't think everything should be chucked in a dropdown menu. For instance, when searching art does the "newest" button really need to be in a dropdown? Why can't it just be right next to "popular"?

The resizing issue seems to have returned. Consider a huge image like: fav.me/d21jr0p . When I uploaded it, I wanted my viewers to be able to see it full-sized. That means the image's actual size, not the size it takes for it to fill my screen (which is a fraction of that). Now people need to hit download before being able to marvel at the insanity for this picture. I want this picture to break dA's carefully thought out lay-out. Because I CAN.

The resizing function also seems to have its glitches. Sometimes the full-sized image will look blurry, or takes long to load. Scrolling up and down also causes lags. V.7 is advertised as being sleeker and simpler than V.6, but these bells and whistles seem to actually cost more CPU strength. Doesn't that mean it's... errr... more complicated than V.6?

Hiding parts of the artist's descriptions is, I think, not a bad thing. Some people have looooong descriptions. But it would be nice if there was a browsing setting for people who prefer to see the full description without having to click so much.

Deviation titles. I don't care if you put them in the Artist's Description, but I think they should ALSO be at the top of the image. Why? Because more often than not the title is a set-up to the image. It provides clues to what you are about to see, or it can be a set-up to a joke which the image will form the punchline to, etc. In short, the title is often PART of the art, and removing it from its proper context means you detract from the art itself.

The clever little "don't forget to comment" message you get when you fave something should go. It's annoying, redundant and in many cases it doesn't reflect the artist's stance on the fave-and-run issue at all. And I think dA should remain neutral on the subject anyway.
EDIT: It would seem that the message doesn't show up when you drag, drop and collect a Deviation. Whether or not this is a bug, I have no idea.

You can no longer link to an image on dA by copying its url and pasting it in a message, which was the most straight-forward way of doing it (that image I linked to a few bullets earlier; it took me three tries to get it right). Please change it back.
EDIT: Apparently the links you get in the urls are SOMETIMES correct (having the Deviation title in it), while at other times they will give the wrong ones (having "#/..." in the URL for some reason). Why this is, or how it works, I haven't been able to figure out yet.


EDIT

It seems the search bar no longer has a dropdown menu which allows you to search deviations, journals, news articles, etc. (Instead there are separate pages you need to visit to find the individual search bars for these items (groups, news, etc.)). This was actually a convenient feature, and I'd love to have it back.

Apparently you are now obliged to declare your gender. While I personally don't mind too much, a lot of people are offended, so I'll list it here.

Not a deliberate change, but a bug: it seems that the Report System is a little broken at the moment. If you try to hit send, the page seems to reload as it should, but the Report Box won't close... I errr... may have sent the same report three or four times by mistake because of this bug... >.> RESOLVED

Another bug: in same boxes the cursor seems to disappear when you're typing messages.

Ads right next to the Deviations are distracting. They should go somewhere else.

/EDIT



I'm not saying that V.7 is all bad. Unlike many others, I'm not finding it too difficult to navigate. It'll get some getting used to, but I think I can manage. I also like that hitting download will no longer take you to the naked image file, but to a special browser. This means that people can no longer hotlink to images. While this is of no concern to the average user, it does mean that dA has plugged a major bandwidth leak which should take some strain off their servers. I can appreciate it from a technical point of view. EDIT: Scratch that. It would seem that this function only works on some Deviations, but not on others.

But still... Some of these changes seem redundant, especially if the aim is to shave a few pixels off the site's header. I can't shake the feeling that these changes were made to make the site more accessible to phone users (and interestingly, I've read numerous complaints about how V.7 doesn't work properly on phones). Ah well...



_{All these changes, and still no "index all" button for favourited news articles? Or the ability to search your faves. Come on, man! XD}


EDIT

Unfixed V.6 bugs:

Searches which sometimes yield 0 results.

Scrapping a Deviation will sometimes remove it from any gallery folders it was in (very annoying).

/EDIT


Requests: Closed
Art trades: Closed (unless I ask you)
Collabs: Only with my friends (sorry)

To-do-list: blue-uncia.nl/pages/status.sht…