Well, first of all, I set out a bunch of milestones for Hypothetical, so that I could measure my progress a bit more. Today I knocked M4 down and got two thirds of the way to M5.

M4 was basically the groups section. That is functionality to browse groups, join them, leave them, create new groups, kick people out of groups and all kinds of funky stuff. That’s all running now. I’m pretty happy with the way it works as well.

M5 is:

• Visiting
• People
• Files

The people section isn’t done yet and I haven’t really thrashed the whole visitor thing that much. That needs some real testing ideally as it’s potential security risk-o-rama. But I’ll get my lovely punters to do that. I’ve used a declarative system, where the view class for a page decides if it’s visitor-friendly. By default all pages are not visitable, so I can tell easily where visitors are able to go and as I add new pages, they’re blocked off automatically. I decided to let visitors see the full set of navigation sections, but get a message if they click any they can’t visit (e.g. post). The page that results in wandering too far reminds me of playing shareware games as a kid. It’s cool.

At points I’ve felt a bit uninspired by some of the interface design I’m doing. Looking at other social sites and taking cues, Hype is a bit flat sometimes. In places where Yahoo would have 15 million links, I have two. But my main target is to get a working version of the software live ASAP so that I can get people on board and take comments from them. In that respect it often just makes the most sense to copy the old Hypothetical and add a few bells and whistles. After all, the old Hype has stood the test of time and still works.

Then there are some other bits where I’ve had no mould. The groups section is an example. I took cues from Yahoo, Tribes and the work I did for TfL for that and it came out looking pretty good. Good enough that I then spread some of the layout style used there to other parts of the site to liven them up a bit. Some areas of the site are pretty utilitarian in design, until I think of something better. But as it’s taking me a moderate amount of time to build, I’m thinking of better stuff as I progress. Here’s to incremental improvement!

I’ve just made the user name at the top of a message into a link to that user’s info page as well. It’s the little things…