New: design your own kilt! Please feed back...

**Nick Fiddes** · 30th January 09, 08:08 AM

I'm delighted to be able to share with you the 'beta' version of a new facility we're developing that I hope many of you may enjoy. This community has been extremely helpful with ideas to improve other things we've done before. So we wanted you to be the first to see it... and hopefully give us feedback, criticisms, and ideas for improvements before we go fully live.

It's Scotweb's new Tartan Designer feature. No, let me put that another way... It's our new Design-your-own-kilt feature. Because this is meant to be more than just a fun toy to play with.

You may have seen online tartan design tools before. But we (ahem) modestly feel this is just a wee bit better than anything that's gone before...

- you can design a new tartan from scratch
- you can load any STA recorded tartan to modify
- you can choose from three colour palettes
- (one of these shows actual weaver's threads)
- you will hopefully find the interface quite intutitive
- you can set expert options like non-mirroring
- you can save and share designs you create
- you get an instant image as you make changes
- you can get a high quality image on demand
- you can commission expert improvement advice
- you can get your designs woven and made into a kilt !!

Please note, there are a few known bugs. And some of the launch functionality is not yet finished. In particular, all saved designs will appear in the Gallery during this pre-launch trial. But soon these will appear only in your own Member's area, and you'll have to "Publish" your design for it to be shared.

A lot of Help information is not yet in place either.

And more bits.

But mostly it should work. Please let us know what you think, and particularly any problems. If anything seems buggy, it would be helpful if you could note your Browser version (e.g. Internet Explorer v7) and Operating System (e.g. Windows XP).

See: http://www.scotweb.co.uk/tartandesign/

Thanks!

Nick

**Nick Fiddes** · 30th January 09, 08:17 AM

By the way, we have a few network problems at our web hosts today, causing our site to be periodically flaky - totally outside our control. If it fails to load quickly, try again later!...

**Paul Henry** · 30th January 09, 08:20 AM

I've started to play already... it's great that it so flexible and the viewing is very fast to refresh. It looks good I am sure I will spend many, many happy hours on it!!

**pipesndrumsnun** · 30th January 09, 08:26 AM

Rats! Not working for me...I'll have to try later. I'm looking forward to designing some new tartans; thanks for this very cool feature!

**pipesndrumsnun** · 30th January 09, 08:31 AM

It is working for me now! VERY cool!! I'm playing with a Sisters of St. Joseph tartan!

P.S. This is my first smiley in two weeks...thanks! ;)

**TNKiltedWolf** · 30th January 09, 08:44 AM

I have explored the application for some time today, and frankly I think it's marvelous. The only thing I've seen negative is that the tartan area on the right hand side "floats", and the options under it such as the full view link, can be hidden. Of course, this my be my computer, does anyone else see it? Thank you sir for your great services and for a grand new way to find a tartan!

**Tartan Hiker** · 30th January 09, 08:45 AM

Wow, this looks amazing. I cannot, however, get the colors to load onto the shelf (IE)
And I find the floating tartan swatch to be a problem, too, for exactly the same reason. I don't see why this was designed this way.

Edit...now I see that the pointer must be on the very bottom edge of teh color block in order to get the pointy finger...this looks like a programming problem as the pointer should work anywhere withing the color block, not just on the edge.

**Nick Fiddes** · 30th January 09, 08:51 AM

Originally Posted by Tartan Hiker

Wow, this looks amazing. I cannot, however, get the colors to load onto the shelf (IE)
And I find the floating tartan swatch to be a problem, too, for exactly the same reason. I don't see why this was designed this way.

The reason for the floating swatch is that otherwise you can be adding/adjusting threads at the bottom of a long list, and be unable to see their effect above. We may be able to improve its behaviour further in due course.

We'd appreciate more info about colours not appearing on the shelf. Does this fail when you load an existing tartan, or just creating a new one? And does it (not) happen with all three palettes?

**Nick Fiddes** · 30th January 09, 08:53 AM

Originally Posted by Tartan Hiker

Edit...now I see that the pointer must be on the very bottom edge of teh color block in order to get the pointy finger...this looks like a programming problem as the pointer should work anywhere withing the color block, not just on the edge.

Thanks. This sounds like an IE bug. We'll look into it next week. Meanwhile, it *should* work okay in Firefox, Safari, or almost any other browser.

**Tartan Hiker** · 30th January 09, 09:13 AM

Another thing I'm noticing is that when I shift to full view, the color blocks on the shelf and the slide bars appear on top of the swatch, but adjusting them does not change the full view tartan (it does change the thumbnail, you can see the bare edge of it in the background) If they don't function in full view, prehaps they should not be visible, which does block the view of the swatch