Two interesting things happened this week - many things, actually, but two I'll mention here. First, yesterday we rolled out the Ajax based front end, and replaced the Flash based interface. For nearly all purposes, the change should be hard to notice - aside from adding a loading bar, and tweaking a few other little things, we attempted to emulate the Flash system entirely.
The upside is that this system will be able to run on the iPhone, and we'll be able to start rolling out improvements to the system as we go along. The downside is that - unlike flash - there's a lot more things that can go wrong between browsers. We've tested it on nearly every major browser (and a few not major browsers) in existence, but there's likely going to be things we can't catch. So, if and when you run across errors, let us know so that we can fix them.
Second, our little office crew has grown by one member. Dan Bowen, a graduate student at Florida State University, flew out to Idaho for the summer in order to work with us/be part of the team/play hackysack with us during lunch breaks.
(that's a total lie... we actually don't have "lunch breaks"... we just tend to eat at our desks and play hacky after it gets dark and everyone else has left the building, but you get the idea).
You can see a picture of him below this post. So our office is actually rather full at the moment, with four of us crowded in and gathered at our own work stations, each with our own tasks. It's fun. There's camaraderie. Not to mention that there's the possibility of a good Diablo II LAN party in preparation for Diablo III and its far off release.
Next week we'll be rolling out a feedback tool for algorithm improvement, but I'll talk about that when we get there.
Cheers, and have a great weekend.
Aaron
(Below) Dan Bowen, Florida State University
