Feature: Frontpage

Mockups

TODO

Image Stream

Basic Features

• Displays images from users and collections you follow.
• Can be filtered to only what the user wants to see(?)

Save State

Note: The following is an implementational nightmare. God help us if we attempt this, but it'll be bloody worth it if it works.

Think about the way Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Reddit, or Google+ work. You have to check back constantly if you want to keep up, otherwise you have to scroll and scroll until you find your last-read piece of content. While this has the benefit of making the user check back frequently, it makes social networks a burden to use. People already have Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Google+, Medium, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Hacker News, Snapchat, and various other sites to keep up with, how do we expect to add ourselves to that circus if we just take up more of people's time?

"Save State" is a conceptual means of keeping the user up to date with whatever content they're following while not also causing said content to feel like a burden. Instead of demanding the user checks constantly, a save state would allow the user to start back from where they left off in their stream. This would sync across devices automatically, and we'd have to store this information in our database in order for it to work.

As an example, a user is on their iPhone 6 during their lunch break and decides to check up on their ImageHex stream. He spends a couple minutes looking through dozens of photographs, maybe he comments on some, and then he finishes his lunch, closes the app, and goes on with his day. That night after he gets home, he goes to his computer to imagehex.com. There, he's dropped into his stream at the last image he saw in the iOS app. Let's say the user's browser window is big enough to allow for three columns of content. The left-most column is a sidebar, the other two are the stream. The sidebar has a little notification that says "Stream starting from where you left off on 'Name's iPhone 6' earlier today". The user now knows why his stream is "the same", he now knows where he was last browsing, and he knows when he was last browsing. The "earlier today" is taken from various pre-determined values, e.g. "earlier today", "last night", "yesterday", "last Saturday", etc.

This is, I hope, fairly obviously beneficial to the user, and remedies the "loop-back" problem users face on every other social network.