another day, another feature
Friday, May 30th, 2008 | by matthew mcglynn
Actually it wasn’t days, but a couple of late nights… but there’s more than one new feature. The mic database gets a little more respectable, and a little more useful, every time.
Since the site’s launch, multipattern mics have been indicated by a series of icons naming the various pickup patterns available. The challenge is that 9-pattern mics are typically described by vendors as such, because the nine patterns don’t all have names. Everybody knows about Cardioid, Hypercardioid, Figure 8, and Omni; less frequently you’ll see Supercardioid and Wide Cardioid or Subcardioid mentioned. But that still leaves three intermediate and unnamed patterns. It’s hard to make an icon for a pickup pattern that has no name.
We solved the problem by making a single ‘9’ icon instead:
Related to this is distinguishing the mics with 9 discrete pattern choices from the mics with non-stepped pots — which at least theoretically have an infinite number of “continuously variable” pickup patterns. These are now indicated with a ‘CV’ icon.
In an exciting display of ninja tooltip prowess, these icons will now tell you what they stand for if you hover over any of them. (Umm, but not on this page. You need to go do a microphone search to see it in action.)
We did the tooltip thing for “related mics” too, which is really useful because the database stores relationship information that is not currently displayed on the site.
Oh, and in between the YUI documentation madness, we implemented a tagging system too. Shoulda done it two years ago. More on that later.
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