Friday, September 21, 2007

Factor web site redesign

Thanks to Elie Chaftari, we have a new Factor web site design. Check it out before it goes live! (Which will probably happen with the release of Factor 0.91).

The "Latest News" sidebar is just a placeholder; I will replace it with an RSS aggregator soon.

Also if you look carefully, you'll see mention of a git repository. Yes, I'm switching to git! Today I encountered a darcs bug/flaw/limitation while merging in Eduardo's patches (it was not Ed's fault) and decided that this would be the very last time.

Right now the repository contains the in-progress quotation compiler/compiled continuations code, which only runs on Mac OS X/PowerPC, FreeBSD/x86 and (just barely) Mac OS X/x86. When it is more stable and supports a wider range of platforms, I will make an announcement and formally retire the darcs repository.

Contributors: please continue using darcs for the next few days, but be prepared to migrate to git Real Soon Now.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Slava,

Just some comments on presentation of the new website.

a) About 45% of the screen is taken up by the dark margins

b) The base fonts used appear very small on my screen resolution (1280x1024) particularly the monospaced fonts - problem is in the use of a specific pixel width instead of a % width.

both of the above make it difficult when increasing the font size for readibility (it's not that friendly to those of us who need to use higher resolution and don't have the best sight). I have tried to view the new site at various resolutions and I like the effect at 800x600. If this can be the same effect at each of the resolutions then that would be good.

c) Other than the above two areas, I like the new design.

regards

Bruce Rennie
(God's Own Country Downunder)

P.S. Slava and Eduardo, I am currently working on some doco and code for the UI areas to give some more user guide information for creating GUI interfaces. Hopefully will be done over the next couple of weeks as I have a project that Factor will be very good for - but I need a simple GUI design process to use with Factor first.

Anonymous said...

Could you please post some details on the Darcs bug/flaw so that I won't run into the same error?

Thanks,
Dirk.

Anonymous said...

same remark about the font:

I need to increase the font size twice in my Firefox browser to be comfortable.

alex said...

Your new design doesn't look that good to me... Current one is more substantial.

Slava Pestov said...

Alex: can you be more specific?

The new site has the same content as the current site, except slightly re-organized.

alex said...

Yes Slava, at a glance the new design has a slick and impressive look to it, but the usability suffers. The actual content doesn't stand out as it should, in fact it's hard to read.
The black side bars aside from wasting screen real estate, have "fixed" background which makes scrolling slow and somewhat clunky.
Overall, a 100% width design with normal size font, no fancy background, with a top menu bar maybe, would work better for this kind of a project. Something along the lines of dovecot.org or something...