While toying around with QuickSnapper, a web service for showing off screen shots that André has got me addicted to, I noticed something silly the designer’s probably didn’t think of when they came up with the pop-up style controls for navigating images.
Hovering over an image, causes pop-up navigational controls to appear
Applying a paradigm that is becoming increasingly popular, QuickSnapper pops up a set of navigational controls when you hover the mouse over an image, similar to what Apple’s QuickTime and VLC use when playing video in full-screen. It’s a pretty natural way to hide visual clutter and it works pretty well… most of the time.
Today, I was browsing around QuickSnapper, clicking the “next image” button time after time, until I stumbled upon this image: a short but wide footer image. Hovering over the image still shows the navigational controls, only this time, they fall outside the image boundaries. This might not have been a problem, but in this case, leaving the image with the mouse causes the controls to disappear, making them inaccessible.
Now you see them...
... and now they're gone
Although this could have been a minor nuisance, it actually makes it impossible to go on any further. The moral of this story: test your stuff :P In their defence, QuickSnapper is still in beta, so they’ll probably iron out these quirks before they go final.