Welcome, Guest Sign In | Sign Up | Help

Incoming!

The Upcoming News Blog

+Add a News Post

Tweaks, New Features, and Really Cool Stuff

Updates! Fun features! And lots of stuff other people did! :)

We've been distracted, so this ended up taking forever, but we've taken your feedback and tweaked the event detail pages. Take a look and let us know what you think! And thanks to Jonathan Nolen for getting us on the right track. (Our users rock!)

We've also been doing fixes and tweaks as well as some neat little things, like automatic MP3 player and YouTube embedding. Anytime you type in a link to an MP3 or a YouTube page by itself, it should automagically turn into a player. This will work in descriptions and comments.

We're not the only ones that have been busy. Our community members have been churning out some amazingly awesome stuff.


  • Check out *.+upTunes!, a new app that lets you search for Upcoming.org events within iTunes. That's hot!

  • For more Flickr + Upcoming.org goodness, check out this insane Greasemonkey script. This totally Upcomingfies your Flickr pages, which is great while we work on our next integration rev.


And of course, we'd be remiss if we didn't highlight some of the really cool stuff being built on Upcoming here at Yahoo, as well:


  • Yahoo! Autos Custom launched their new Events Calendar, powered by Upcoming. <mrburns>Excellent</mrburns>

  • ZoneTag is now auto-tagging Flickr photos with Upcoming events! Holy-high-tech.

  • Aaron Cope from Flickr wrote Upcalendar, a Nokia Series 60 utility to sync your Upcoming.org watchlist to your phone's calendar.


Drop us a line here or on our Yahoo! Group at yws-events if you have something you want us to show off! Or come meet us at Open Hack Day on the Yahoo! campus on September 29-30.

Comments
yup the new details page is much better, fyi youtube embedded players show up as nothing in a rss feed (bloglines)
Posted 1 year ago
Thanks! The YouTube player will depend on your RSS reader... The feedreader I use displays it fine, while others might not allow embedded Flash objects.
Posted 1 year ago
I dunno, I'm still fond of the details page two versions ago: a nice bold header that looked like a paper brochure, highlighting the event name and time. This version... my main problem is telling where the description ends and the comments begin, especially in descriptions that use a lot of bold type. Maybe I'm just a crumudgeon, but I don't use a lot of the new features.

Oh, and the ordering of events is somewhat messed up on the Shanghai page. (now I feel like a total wet blanket.)
Posted 1 year ago
msittig: whoa, we'll take a look at the Shanghai page. That's just... funky.

We're still doing tweaking on the events detiail so we'll see what we can do with comments and description (I'm still not happy w/ some of the layout out stuff, but it was better to just push out and tweak).

re new features: well, we figure that if we throw enough of them out some of them will stick. :)

I think that some of the features we've pushed out, like the avatars, face cards, comment character counting, etc are things that should all add up to a better user experience as a whole. We're continuing to smooth things w/ a lot of little tweaks and with the the new stuff we've pushed recently.

Of course there are some bigger features coming down the pipe, but let us know if there's anything in particular you're looking for. If it makes sense we'll try to do it!
Posted 1 year ago
The improvements to the details pages are much appreciated here - especially the new attending/watching lists.

Like msittig though I can see the seperation between comments and description isn't ideal. Personally I think I'd be inclined to just extend the grey box to include the description as well as the when/where/category. On another note, perhaps the attending/watch list should also be moved directly beneath the attending watch radio buttons?

Minor points though, it's definitely looking a lot clearer :)
Posted 1 year ago
Another suggestion I should have included in the last post: I'd really like to see My Groups listed on the front page in the same way My Metros are. I find myself using groups to discover new events more often than just browsing a metro these days.
Posted 1 year ago
Hang tight Mark, Dashboard improvements are coming. :)

And yeah, the toolbar in between is bugging the heck out of me, we'll continue to push the pixels around in our spare moments. (ahh, UI massaging, nice and relaxing)
Posted 1 year ago
Sounds good :)

A bug I've just noticed:
http://upcoming.org/event/64541/
This event has 22 people watching & attending, but only 16 are listed. It seems to be missing the 'show all' button for some reason?

If I'm not logged in, the complete list is hidden but the 'show all' button is there and works correctly. I assume that's how it should be.
Posted 1 year ago
Why are some cities listed twice? For example, Houston - it is listed as /us/tx/houston and /tx/tx/houston - so it makes it confusing when you go to add an event to figure out which one to use.

I *heart* Upcoming. Is there a way to get e-mail notifications of when people respond that they are attending an event?
Posted 1 year ago
markwheeler: Fixed! Thanks for reporting it.
Posted 1 year ago
christinebpc: Duplicate and junk cities exist because people added them, either by accident or on purpose... This is one of my biggest pet peeves remaining on the site, and I hope we can take care of it in the next major release.

Your e-mail idea is on the feature to-do list, so we'll count that as another vote. Thanks!
Posted 1 year ago
Hello!
I'm very flattered about the fact, that you mention +upTunes here! However, it actually is called *.+upTunes! With a ! at the end (like in Yahoo!) and *.+ in the beginning. (Far too much symbols in this name, the ! has to go! i mean go.)
*.+ should represent the face expression of someone having a good time at a good show.
It would be great if you could correct that!

All the Best,
jns
Posted 1 year ago
*.+Fixed!
Posted 1 year ago
Whoa, great improvements!

Are you planning on doing a redesign of the homepage, as in the users dashboard. I don't like the fact that a whole list of metros is listed before my events.
Posted 1 year ago
Definitely.
Posted 1 year ago
research: I like your accuracy. :)

upcoming: I love your improvements.

I think the MP3 player needs a little work; but it's great for now.

I love Flickr integration; and am about to install the greasemonkey script.

I seem to have found the feature that forces your friends to JOIN upcoming... but now I'm looking for a feature to make them USE it.

Also, I would be quite interested in seeing someone giving the Yahoo! Toolbar team a nudge to get them add Upcoming.org

EDIT: Is there any particular reason why today, 24th Sept 2006, I just got an Upcoming.org Event Reminder for an event on 8th August 2006?
Posted 1 year ago
Looking good! Thanks for the bug fixes.

It's great to see you guys continually working on this.
Posted 1 year ago
Is there any way you can make private events truly private? I have 2 groups on here - one for 4 girls and another for all of our friends. Some events apply to both groups, but we'd like to keep the group of 4 events private. Unfortunately, everyone who is friends with us can see the events for both groups. Can anything be done about this?
Posted 1 year ago
coxy: there some big things we're cooking up that will hopefully be interesting as far as pulling people back and hopefully making it more useful for them. what's the feature that forces them to join btw?

On the event reminder: that's really weird and probably shouldn't happen. I'll have to take a look and see what's up.

Hussy: Right now, that's the way this feature is, though we've been giving this some more thought. I think we can enable better privacy, but we'll need to give it a bit of though on the best way to do it. So yes, we'll try to do something about it - we'll need to think a bit about it.
Posted 1 year ago
I appreciate it! I just found you guys and my friends and I are using this site like crazy - I think 15 of us so far.
Posted 1 year ago
lhl: ah no, there is no feature that forces users to join, as such. only, I joked about one with waxpancake in some other news posts.

since then more and more of my friends are joining upcoming.org, with help from the invite a friend function, which is nice...

...but my friends end up only visiting once or twice.
Posted 1 year ago
where;d you get that flash mp3 player? I've seen it on other sites as well.

link?

thanks.
Posted 1 year ago
*.+thanx!
i released a new version today, check it out!
Posted 1 year ago
upcomingNYC: I'm using the 1-pixel-out player. http://www.1pixelout.net/code/audio-player-wordpress-plugin/

It's pretty neat.
Posted 1 year ago
Sign Up or Sign In to comment on this news post.
Tools
Upcoming Badges for Your Blog/Website | Invite Friends | Groups | Developers API
Help
News Blog | Community Guidelines | FAQ | Contact Us | Suggestion Board