#feature_release

[allotrop]

For all the movie fans out there

We have two new things for everyone who loves movies. You can now see all (English and Hindi only for now) movies playing in India as well as the movies coming to our theaters in the near future. 

You can see trailers, cast and other important information in an easy to browse format. 

Check our Movies in Theaters page or our Upcoming Movies Page for more. 

[allotrop]

Rolling out Collections

The directory vs search argument was long settled when Google triumphed over Yahoo 15 years back. Search is wonderful and is magical as a navigational tool. 

But, search is not a lone warrior. It needs help in many places. A good example of this is on the desktop. Search on desktop has been bad (the default Windows and Ubuntu search, OS X seems much better). Google Desktop Search promised a lot, but died midway. So, we kept making folders even 15 years after search went mainstream. Folders give us more control, and familiarity with the interface. And, we love things which play well with our folders. Hi, Dropbox ! 

But, I must be insane to take cues from desktop since we are in the post-PC era. Searching for an app works pretty well on iOS/Android. Still, people keep making folders. 

Photo by Nick Paden from http://branch.com/b/what-s-on-your-iphone-home-screen#AvdGFottp4g

Collections are making a comeback on the web too. From Google+ (which allows you to send your post to collections of people) to Pinterest to Amazon, they are everywhere. It is their ubiquitousness that pushed me from not adding them to Allotrop. 

I believed that the semantic model of linking nodes together is better and more usable. But, in hindsight, it proved to be very difficult to make a good UX for linking nodes together without making it too much extra work for the user. I also realised that collections are the easiest way for users to provide additional context to their posts. 

And so, collections are now a core part of Allotrop. Every user gets started with two default collections - Things I Use and Life is Random. The first is for all the things you use to get stuff done while the latter is for all the random things you find interesting. 

This is an early release and a lot of additional features like following a collection, and moving a post from one collection to another will be available soon. You will be then able to move your existing posts from the Life is Random collection where they reside now. 

The vision of helping people explore the most interesting and useful information using linked data is still at the core of Allotrop. Collections are another way of helping people achieve this. 

[allotrop]

See Notifications and who liked and reposted your posts

I love reading Hacker News, and if there is one thing I could add to it, it will be notifications. Without them, keeping track of who is interacting with your posts, is a big pain.

I don't want users to go through the same, so here is the first release of notifications.

This is how they look

I hope you enjoy it.

There are some known issues with notifications and I am working on fixing them.

One of the other things that wasn't available in the initial release was who liked or reposted your posts. It only showed the count. Almost everyone found this bug. Thank you alert users !

This has been fixed and should be working for you.

Please let me know if you find any issues with these features.

My apologies if you had registered and haven't received your invite till now. You should get one real soon.

If you haven't registered for an invite, you can do that on www.allotrop.com

Also, all users can invite 10 of their friends, so look out for someone already using it. If you have any questions or feedback, please send a mail to me at [email protected] or catch us on Facebook or Twitter.