Wanted: Feedback on Zooming in our Interface
We have a lot of great stuff happening on Notes from Nature and a big thanks to everyone, and more soon, about passing the million transcription mark. But for now we’d really like some advice from transcribers on what we think is a major upgrade to our interfaces. On the Herbarium interface, we have implemented ZOOMING. On both herbarium sheets and macrofungi labels, you previously would select a region, and then get a zoomed-in version of that section. However, there were some issue with this, well noted in the Notes from Nature talk forums. The new interface uses very simple pan and zoom controls to get the label in the location and size you want.
Please try it out on the Herbarium sheet records and, assuming there aren’t any major bugs or other issues, we’ll be implementing that on the other “specimen” interfaces (e.g. the Macrofungi and Calbug collections) as soon as possible! If you do find any problems or issues, you can let us know right here, on the blog, as comments or you can log into the Notes from Nature talk forums and post there. We hope this removes a lot of frustration!
ZOOM!
Notes from Nature 
After a very brief tryout, I like it much better than the old maybe-it-will-show-me -what-I-am-selecting-maybe-not interface. Thanks! And it’s great to be able to zoom into the specimen to see something interesting.
thank you so much, Irv! We are making some modest improvements to the initial deployment and hope to get zoom working on the other collections ASAP.
I like this very much on the Herbarium; thank you to everyone who made it possible. Right now I’m in the middle of a load of Loran C. Anderson’s specimens with his wide labels, and the zoom is vastly easier to use than the previous fixed-width marquee.
Any chance of implementing it for macrofungi? I tried macrofungi briefly when the Herbarium was out of images recently, and had some problems with the popup window there that were so bad that I had to work around them by taking a separate screenshot with another tool before I started transcribing.
Helen, YES! This is one of the very first items on a list of upgrades and fixes for our new programmer who will start in early May!