Various Issues With 2.0
 

Hi,

First, thanks for providing this site. It has been very helpful in regulating my diet and exercise.

From using it daily over the past month or so, I've noticed a number of issues that probably deserve your attention:

1) The site is very slow to load. Even for a simple page like Settings, it can take several seconds for the content to render.
2) The site is even slower to load for complicated pages. Really, really slow compared to most modern sites.
3) As the content renders, the positioning is chaotic. I can be trying to click to edit something in my Food Log only to have it all scroll away because the list of Recent foods was finally populated.
4) Especially with all the performance issues, some of the steps required to record information seems completely unnecessary. To use the Food Log as an example again, I don't see why clicking the green button in the "ADD" column doesn't just immediately add the food with the specified amount and unit. Instead, it loads a completely new page that requires me to put in the information again.
5) Recording information is unreliable. On numerous occasions, after clicking "Add Food To Log", nothing happens, or the page appears to refresh and I have to click it again.
6) Sessions are very short and you aren't automatically taken to the login page when your session is up. This results in trying to enter information and getting a screen full of errors before being redirected to the login page. Due to the issues mentioned above, even the login page is an annoyance due to the delay in populating the username.

I use Chrome from different computers and different operating systems (one Windows 7 and the other Linux Mint), so I am guessing I'm not the only one that these things are affecting.

Since I happen to be a web developer myself, I have a few suggestions:
- Stop loading things with JavaScript/jQuery. Include as much as possible in the initial markup so as to avoid content continuously trickling in. (This might go against the whole design of 2.0, but I don't know what to say... the current performance seems really bad and should really be fixed, at least according to my experience thus far.)
- Don't wait for .ready() to bind events. I haven't checked if that's the actual cause of certain functionality not working the first time, but the symptoms sure seem to match.
- Restrict the sizes of your elements. For things that are going to take a long time no matter what, reserve the space they need ahead of time so there isn't chaos when they do finally load.
- If for some reason you want to force people to confirm their entries, a modal popup would probably be a lot better than a completely new page, at least for desktop users.
- It is a good idea to have a default timeout, since weight and health information is considered private by many, but let users turn if off if they want. Even if you don't want to do this for some reason, you can use AJAX to poll the server until the session is up and then send the browser to the login page.

Feel free to let me know if you'd like any further information from me.

Thanks!

Thanks for these valuable suggestions!!

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