Let's talk about that new deviantArt layout that rolled out back in may. Specifically, two issues I have with it, one minor and one much less minor.
For the purpose of this little rant, I'll be comparing it to two other art sites I regularly use: Pixiv and FurAffinity (yeah, yeah, I know. I should really stop using FA. I'll get to it. Spare me the grief. It's besides the point of this thread.)
So, UI design. It's not trivial, but unfortunately, there's one major oversight that is admittedly fairly minor, but I wouldn't be surprised if, as I explore further into Eclipse, it's actually a symptom of underlying issues.
The arrows in this picture point to where you can go to see what people you watch have posted. They do not link to the same place. The notification dots do not disappear in one place when you look at the other. If I clear watches under "Watch", the red dots don't go away
Seriously! If I want all the dots to go away, I have to look at new art under "Deviants you watch", new posts under "Posts", then go clear all that out under "Watch". Who fucking designed this that way?! It's one thing to have two places where new art shows up. But to have to visit all these places just to clear notification dots?! Why would you do that?
The old dA layout had a system similar to FA. New posts were grouped under notifications and when you cleared them, that was that. It stopped bugging you. (Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot of that for you.)
It may seems trivial, but I would not be surprised if this is indicative of deeper design issues. (If it is, I'll get back to you and let you know what they are.)
Let's talk about something less trivial: resource usage. This is something I care a lot about. (If you head to my website, you'll notice it uses very few resources.) Eclipse *majorly* fails here.
Let's compare some Pale Moon memory snapshots. (Images once again CW'd because d'oh.) Going off of these, Eclipse is using over twice as much memory as Pixiv and the old dA layout (revived by internet archive) and over 20 times more RAM than FA.
This may not seem bad, but let me give you an idea here. My computer is a pretty fucking powerful computer. It's a Precision M4800 with a Core i7-4810MQ and 16GB of RAM. deviantArt is noticably slower than Pixiv and FA. So bad, in fact, that when I first opened the site since may and was trying to read through the accumulated posts, the site was literally *chugging*. Core i7. 16GB RAM. And this site chugs. How do you fuck up *that badly*.
So, yeah. Maybe at some point I'll put this all this a little better (as well as working out all my other issues with Eclipse) and write it up into a blog post, but for now, a small thread on issue's I've got with Eclipse.
I will now leave you to go on with your day. (Have a nice rest of your day, BTW!)
For comparison, here's Pixiv and FA. (under a CW because I forgot to censor some mildly lewd art on the Pixiv screenshot and bordline lewd on FA). Notice that Pixiv presents it immediately. There are other places to find that, but none of them present these janky notification dots. FA's system is basically dA but better. One place where you find new art and when you clear that, it stops bugging you. That's that.