Blog: October 2010

Listing Detail Rollovers – New storeBlox 2 Feature

Listing Detail Rollovers screen shot

Rollovers show more detail at a glance

Want to give your customers quick access to product details while they’re searching and browsing? Listing Detail Rollovers show extensive product details just by moving the mouse over a product icon in search listings and product listings. Customers can view color options, full grid pricing and other details.

These rollovers automatically pull product details, so there’s no additional work for you to other than to define the details you want to see in the rollover. The rollovers will follow the existing visual style of your site, but will generally require a small amount of design and review before implementing. This feature can make the browsing experience much richer, especially for customers looking for particular colors or options. Try it out here!

Listing Rollovers are available for storeBlox 2 e-commerce platform customers right now! Just contact us for details.

An App World?

App icon with exclamation pointIf you’ve picked up an iPhone, Android phone, iPad or just about any modern smartphone, you’ve probably used what is currently called an “app”. The popularity of this term is an odd phenomenon, given that apps, more commonly known as “applications”, have been around for dozens of years. We can thank the product marketing geniuses at Apple for taking something we’ve all had on our computers for next to forever and turning it into the next big thing in technology.

To be fair, an app on a tiny phone that fits in your hand is a slightly different monster than the Outlook application that sits on your desktop computer. Ten years ago, the idea of packing so much technology into a device smaller than a deck of cards was just a pipe dream. True, devices like the Palm Pilot had apps for various functions like calendars, email and so on, but modern apps have far surpassed them in quality and functionality. You can now run games on your iPhone that are comparable in quality to modern consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It’s really astonishing.

What sets today’s app world apart from applications of the past—both on desktop PCs and portable devices—is the sheer quantity and breadth of the apps themselves, not to mention the pace at which new apps are developed and released. Since the iPhone launched just a few years ago, hundreds of thousands of apps have been built for its app store, and thousands more are available on the Android platform. It’s an explosion in software like we’ve never seen before.

While none of us will ever download even a tiny fraction of all those apps, the ease of purchasing smartphone (or iPad, iPod Touch or forthcoming tablet) apps and the inexpensive, impulsive nature of the purchase have some pretty interesting implications. We are now accessing information in ways we may not have expected. Data is becoming specialized, something you click an icon to access rather than searching or browsing to find. It’s going to be a wild ride, and it may change the way we interact with web technology in ways we didn’t expect. (more…)