Yahoo! Cool Thing of the Day

...and we ought to drop it as our national game? I dunno, I've never been a fan, but apparently the masses disagree, judging by the staggering number of them that have signed up for Yahoo! Sports Fantasy Baseball since its grand opening last Friday. The game launched with a beautiful new look and a host of fancy features, including the ability to change a league commissioner, an easier-to-use offline draft application, and tools to set persistent, personalized league URLs that'll stick around from year to year (with much more to come on that front). One of the absolutely coolest features that we added, though, has got to be the drag & drop rosters. Oh! The title of this post totally makes sense now!

To give you an idea of why this is awesome, behold the old and busted version on the left, versus the new hotness on the right:

Old and busted? Drop down menus; swapping players takes four clicks; easy to put the roster into an error state (too many players trying to occupy the same position). New hotness? Drag and drop table rows; swapping players takes one extended click and looks pretty in the process; impossible to put roster into an error state; valid moves are visually indicated; and it's easy to see what changes you've made. Also, more blue! It's hard to describe just using screenshots, but hopefully you get the idea.

Another cool thing about this new feature is the way it came about. Some of the engineers thought it would be pretty sweet to have rosters that you could set by dragging the players around, so they put together a prototype for a technology presentation at one of our offsites. Later, for one of the Sports group hack days (well, weeks), our front-end web developer extraordinaire spent a few days sleekifying the look and tying the actions into our actual roster submission process. The product managers know a good idea when they see it, and put the feature onto the roadmap for this season of Fantasy Baseball. Innovation ensued!

The only caveat is that it may not work in Safari (apparently their event model doesn't recognize mouse events on table rows), but we're doing our best to get that fixed up. So, if you have a chance, join the game and try it out! It's a total drag.

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