Two key items primarily drive the user interface design for Maneno: low bandwidth and ease of use. Given that a great deal of the future target user base will be people who have spent very little time on the internet to date and probably less time blogging, having a system that is as straightforward to use as possible is quite critical.

While creating a simple manner in which to enter text for an article is pretty easy to do, images pose a much bigger problem. First, they're often large in file size. Secondly, getting them on the net can be a process of many steps involving uploading them to a site such as flickr, then linking to them, then seeing that the size is wrong, then having to code them, then hopefully getting it all right, eventually. We now have in a place a system that will hopefully make all of this a lot easier.

When writing a new article, you can choose to upload images from the same page and embed them in the post, all in one action. There are no page refreshes. This is no needing to be an HTML coding expert. The system automatically re-sizes everything to the proper width. You just choose your image, click submit, and once it arrives Maneno, you click to embed it. Naturally, this is all multilingual with the interface in the current eight languages of Maneno. It's also heavily cross-browser compatible and won't crash Firefox like other uploaders I've used will often do. There is a limit of five images per post though. We did this out of bandwidth considerations as well as space considerations. If this function becomes quite popular down the road, we'll look to expand the limits as is possible.

This is obviously a very new feature and it's doing things in a rather new way, so if you have any problems, please let us know. Otherwise, happy image uploading!