Improved discovery and UX

This weekend ShadowTrackr has undergone a quite noticable update. There are a few extra sources to discover urls and ip addresses. If you see previously unknown assets appear on your timeline, this is the reason.

The messages for these new assets have improved too. Instead of spamming your timeline with multiple messages related to the new asset, we now try to put this all in a "details" box in the message that you can expand or close. This keeps the timeline neat and more relevant.

Since the user interface had to be updated for this anyway, it was time to fix some serious UX problems that have been creeping in as well. With any software system that grows organically over time you always run the risk of loosing some consistency with every new feature. A lot of these issues have been fixed now. I'll mention the most important ones.

On most of the internet, blue links are clickable. In ShadowTrackr this was mostly true too. Except for the timestamp. Somehow this ended up being blue and unclickable. It was also in the wrong location. If you look at the place where most timeline-like systems display the timestamp, you'll notice it's near the left top. That's we're users are trained to expect it. We had it at the top right. Oops. That's fixed now.

Eating your own dog food is always a good idea. This will make you feel the pain users are feeling. One of the majotrpain points for me was not being able to copy ip addresses and urls from the timeline in order to investigate them further in other tools. That is fixed now. Any part of the message can be copy-pasted. The link to view the asset, or suggestion, is now displayed in blue at the right top.

About those links, up until now it was sort of a surprise what would happen if you clicked something on the timeline. Would you stay on site and get more details? Or would you end up on an external site to view the source? The new-style links will show you what is going to happen. If the link leads off site, you will see which site you'll be opening. A keyword hit on pastebin.com will have a link that says "open pastebin.com".

If you have any thoughts on the new user interface, I'd be happy to hear them.