ACS Grid View TOC
by mitch on Oct 14 2010 (9862 Views)Anyone who pokes around ACS' JACS beta site will have noticed they now offer a grid view for TOC abstracts. Screen shot below
At a recent ACS on campus focus group I remarked to a member of the JACS beta team how similar it looks to ChemFeeds (screenshot below). The young marketing graduate said with a big smile, "Yeah, we know." "We knew about it."
If you want to play with ACS' TOC Grid View read the instructions here: Grid View TOC
Mitch
We should start our own Blogging ACS. With blackjack!
Hi everyone,
I am the primary developer who worked on the Grid View, and I can guarantee you that the inspiration did not come from ChemFeeds (though I was definitely aware of it). My main sources of inspiration were actually the New York Times' "Times Skimmer" (http://www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer) and our own ACS Mobile iOS app (because of the Abstract Viewer portion of the project).
To be sure, there are similarities between the grid layout of ChemFeeds and our Grid View, but really... viewing content in a grid layout isn't terribly unique. To be honest, I think the biggest feature of the Grid View isn't the grid layout at all; it's the Abstract Viewer layer that we built on top of it that really adds utility to the idea. I don't think there is a faster, more convenient way to browse through a list of abstracts than the way we've done it in the Grid View.
Finally, the colleague you quoted in your post tells me that she actually said, "We knew about it." which is quite different than the quote you used. I don't doubt that she was smiling though.
Anyway, I appreciate the fact that you wrote a post about this project. We respect this blog, its audience, and the opinions/ideas of everyone in this particular community quite a bit, so I'm happy to see the Grid View get mentioned here. I invite all of you to leave your feedback on the Grid View project on the project page that Mitch linked to in his post. Thanks for hearing me out.
Alex Kim
Manager, Web Product Development
ACS Publications
@Alex. Thanks for the comment, I think the Grid View project will be well received once it is fully rolled-out.
The fact that Mitch cobbled Chemfeeds together as an unpaid one-man development team (as far as I know) is still pretty badass.
@James - Agreed. It's good stuff, and it's also not limited to ACS content. I just felt the need to explain how our project came about.
A coworker said that my comment sounded angry/defensive. Sorry if it came off that way; I definitely didn't intend for it to. I really am just glad to have the project publicized here because the more eyes and feedback we get on it, the better. Again, I just wanted to clarify how the project developed.
Grid View is nice. The abstract popups are especially nice and smooth to open and close.
i love the cheat code to enter grid view. grid view is tight, too.