Hi Pinside,

There's a lot of stuff brewing at PinsideHQ and today one of these brews is ready to be served, steamy hot and without milk and sugar!

Grid View groups topics into boxes by sub-forum or by user-specific view. It aims to give you a wider view of all that's happening on Pinside, and to help you keep track of your favorited/visited/posted/etc topics.

Grid View combines all sub-forum and user-views into one highly customizable page!

The grid view in all its glory

Whoah!!! Change! I'm freaking out so much right now.
Take it easy, Pinside friend. Grid view aims to complement the existing topics list view, not replace it. You can switch between the old (list view) and the new (grid view) at any time. Altough I'm sure you'll love Grid View, once you get to know it. Read on and I will explain how to switch between the formats.

Phew, okay so what's the purpose of Grid View?
Glad you asked. Grid view aims to do a bunch of things:
- Give you a more diverse view of everything that takes place on Pinside
- Keep new topics in sight for longer
- Show your user-relevant topics ("views"), all on one screen
- Allow each Pinsider to customize their grid/experience
- Provide a quick way to search for topics
- Make you coffee when you're tired.

Sound good? Let's dive in. To better explain what's going on, I've prepared this little instructional image:

Grid view, explained

(Yeah, I know. I should probably work on my Photoshop skills.)

Let's start with arrow 1: the main front page layout switcher that allows you to have either grid view or the good ol' list view.

Arrows 2a and 2b. As you can see, this new grid design revolves around the separation of topics into different boxes. Boxes can be based on the topic sub-forum, e.g. "restoration" (arrow 2b) or by a user view that pertains to you, like "topics in which you posted" (arrow 2a). Examples of user views are: topics in your favorites, topics you posted to, topics you viewed in the past, topics linked to games in your collection (or wishlist) etc.

Moving on to the top right, you can see arrow 5 points to the column count selector. If you're on a big desktop computer, you can easily set the column count to 3. It's pretty darn cool if you do that. On smaller screens, the 2 column count is probably the best choice. When your screen is too small, the column count selector gets hidden and the count is always set to 1.

Arrow 6 points to an important choice, so pay attention here! The "Hide Idle" switch allows you to hide all topics that don't have any new posts in them. Very simple way to save screen estate, scroll less, save brain cells on scanning thread titles that don't have anything new for you. Etc. However, if you're looking for a topic and can't find it: check the hide idle switch!

Arrows 3 and 4 is where it gets fun and where you can customize your grid! You can customize a few different things:
- Re-arrange the order of the boxes (arrow 4). click this button, then drag and drop the boxes into the desired order.
- Configure appearance and topic count for each box (arrow 3)
- Disable sub-forums or views you are not interested in (arrow 3, the X icon)

Rearrange the grid into the order you desire

Best of all... All customization is linked to your account and will sync across different browsers!

The quick topic search at arrow 7 allows you to quickly filter all boxes for specific topics. It currently only searches through topic titles but I might add some extra "quick filters".

Finally, the "Load more" link at arrow 8 allows you to load more topics from that box. And the "go to view / sub-forum" link at arrow 9 will bring you into the view or sub-forum for a full-screen list.

...

There you have it! I hope you like this new format.

Got suggestions? Let me know. Doesn't it all function (quite) right in your browser? Report it! I couldn't test this on all browsers on all platforms, so your help is appreciated.

Coffee please!
And now for that coffee... Grid Vieeeew, one coffee please!

Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.

Grid View was developed and extensively tested in Chrome (on Mac). I can't imagine Chrome on Mac and Windows differing that much that you would run into all these issues? I will do some testing on Windows (VM) tomorrow, but just to get the obvious out of the way: can this not be caused by any browser add-on/extension you may have installed?

I just checked and one of the files didn't update properly. I corrected that, so sorting/customizing should work properly now.

I will still do some more Windows > Chrome testing tomorrow.

As I said in the announce, the new grid view is not intended to ever replace the 'old' list. They both have their uses. That said, I hope you'll give Grid View a shot as it will make keeping track of new stuff much easier!

The boxes do not auto-refresh as that would probably get annoying. However, you can use the arrows icon at the top of any box to refresh its contents manually.

Topic view counters ('green boxes') now refresh every time you return (via back button) from a topic. That also works for the 'old' list view, by the way.

Interesting. To be honest, I never did any extensive testing on grid re-arranging on my mobile. I'll see what I can do, but likely it will involve adding 'drag handles' or giving you more scroll space on the sides in arrange/customize mode.

Keep in mind that we only store the order of the boxes, not their exact locations. The grid will automatically arrange the boxes in this order. This was the only way we could keep the whole thing flexible (also for 1-3 column layout switching).

Good suggestion, but that would require quite some changes. I will keep it in mind. If it gets requested by others as well I'll consider adding that.

Fixed now, thanks for reporting!

Much more coming soon! We've been developing some stuff in parallel (bad idea) and are now sitting on some cool stuff that's nearly finished.

That's a tough one. The sub-forums hide settings do not currently sync between grid and list view. I do want to implement this but it is quite tricky. Sorry!

Thanks. I *think* I fixed this issue now. It's a bit difficult because it seems to only happen rarely.

The last viewed "format" (list or grid) should be stored in your user settings and carried over to other browsers as well (like all settings). If this is still happening, please shoot me a PM and I'll try to work with you on figuring out what is going wrong.

Luckily, you can choose between grid and list views!

Simply use the button at the top of the forum. See attached screenshot.

grid_view_switch (resized).png