A Picture is Worth a Thousand Chat Messages

Humans have the ability to process information and communicate faster visually than they do via text or language. In this article from our engineering team, we take a look at some examples using this method in various aspects of Splice.

Primate ability to process images: 65 million years old
Primate ability to process written language: 0.0052 million years old


 

You just opened a pull request for a feature you’ve never seen before. Would you rather see this:

Or this:

Add “save as” functionality to timeline: allow user to create a new project from an existing project by clicking the cog on the right of the timeline entry and entering the name of the new project in the modal. This will create a splice of the user’s project and redirect the user to it.

TL;DR

204020


You’re moving through a backlog. Would you rather see this:

Or this:

There is a weird interaction bug with the accordion on the revision detail page. If you expand the tracks and contract them quickly, it looks like the container overflows into the one below it.

TL;DR

204023


You ask someone in chat how to run an opsworks command. Would you rather follow this:

Or this:

“Go into opsworks, click ‘Deployments’, click ‘Run Command’, select ‘Execute Recipes’, and put the right stuff in Recipes to execute and Custom Chef Json (under Advanced)”

TL;DR

204033


203982

Free and speedy GIF Creation tool: licecap

Shoutout to @nakajima for the idea of gif-based development

June 18, 2014