Cocoa Dev Central Redesign

There's a new Cocoa Dev Central design up. Here's a quick rundown of what the design goals were, how the content is different. First, a screenshot:

Cocoa Dev Central


The goal was for the design to have high production values, yet be simple and clear. I didn't set out to do white metal, but I guess that's what we have. This also forced me to go back and find all of the Cocoa content on Theocacao. Turns out there's quite a lot.

Everything validates and markup is very clean (151 lines), which is interesting if you're into that sort of thing. As usual, I designed in Safari and tested in Camino, which uses the Firefox's Gecko engine. No changes were necessary for Gecko. If you're using WinIE to view the site, I wish you the best of luck.

There are some new additions to the Cocoa blogs section. Colin Wheeler has a blog he calls Cocoa Samurai, and already has a bunch of tutorials. Andy Finnel used to work for Macromedia and has been doing a lot of writing, often on Core Data. The Recent Posts section lists a cross-section of relevant Cocoa posts from different places.

One design decision that might seem a bit odd is that the words "Learn Cocoa" are plastered in large block letters across the top instead of the site name. I think if somebody ends up at the site they already know what it's called, and it's just simpler to say what you're doing here. If you think this is crazy talk, check out Apple's site. Interesting, no?
Design Element
Cocoa Dev Central Redesign
Posted Oct 10, 2006 — 23 comments below




 

duzbin — Oct 10, 06 2004

It doesn't look bad in IE, but not as nice as FF.

The gradient across the page is all squashed up at the top, and the rest is just in onc colour.
Images have a background colour.
I have noticed that with PNG images in IE 6.
It seemed fixed in 7, but I don't have that any more.

The site works, that’s what counts, it is only the images that are not rendered correctly, but not many people who are interested in cocoa are using IE.

Even people like me who are forced to use Windows at work, if they even know what Cocoa is, they probably know better than to use IE.

Daniel Lyons — Oct 10, 06 2005

Pretty good for someone who's not a professional web developer!!! :D :D :D

/gruber

I think it looks excellent. I actually was there earlier tonight and thought it looked much cleaner.

John Gruber — Oct 10, 06 2006

You *should* be a web developer.

Christian Machmeier — Oct 10, 06 2007

This is a great redesign. And the others are right, your webdesign skills are out-standing. I just wanted to let you know about two issues: First the "Apple Mailing Lists" doesn't work. Secondly, what about the archived tutorials? Do you plan to apply the new design to these "old" pages, too?

Scott Stevenson — Oct 10, 06 2008 Scotty the Leopard

First the "Apple Mailing Lists" doesn't work

Fixed. Thanks.

Secondly, what about the archived tutorials? Do you plan to apply the new design to these "old" pages, too?

Working that out. Some need to be scraped because of API changes, others updated.

Qwerty Denzel — Oct 10, 06 2009

I sure wasn't expecting this! The last redesign was in Feb '06!

Great design. The new schemes of colour and layout have a really pleasant Apple feel to it; minimal yet robust. I also like the subtle lighter glow at top to keep the background from being a dull and uniform.
The easy-to-target button-links everywhere are fantastic.

Although I like the header, it makes me want to keep scrolling upwards! (Interesting choice to omit the Apple logo and scale the bottom of the iMac).

Now, I'm no web developer (I concur, Gruber :) ), but can I ask why are the sections' and header's titles' made using images and not text?

Scott Stevenson — Oct 10, 06 2010 Scotty the Leopard

can I ask why are the sections' and header's titles' made using images and not text?

I wanted to use Myriad Pro for those headers, and most people don't have that font.

Qwerty Denzel — Oct 10, 06 2011

I wanted to use Myriad Pro for those headers, and most people don't have that font.

Uhh, sorry, that was so obvious, I didn't notice the distinction from the body text.
Thanks for your time! :P

Alastair Tse — Oct 10, 06 2012

Great (re-)design. Simple and clean, and the impressive 151 lines of markup only is the point that I think only geeks appreciate :)

Jesper — Oct 10, 06 2013

An excellent act one.

Scott — Oct 10, 06 2018

Looks very nice -- my only comment is not enough foreground/background contrast. if the wash in the background was about 30% darker across the board it would look much more stunning and really make the sections stand out.

Robert — Oct 10, 06 2021

Looks good to me ...

This brings a questions to mind, along these lines ???

Does there exist a Cocoa tutorial for the ZonicKRM SDK 1.0.5 ??

Or is it an easy thang and I just need to try it -- more ?

Or is there something better then Kagi that I sould be using, comments would be GREATLY appreciated !!!

Scott Stevenson — Oct 10, 06 2023 Scotty the Leopard

Does there exist a Cocoa tutorial for the ZonicKRM SDK 1.0.5 ?

Not sure.

Robert — Oct 10, 06 2025

Oh, by the way ...

... if you want to stay ahead of the game with Panther coming ...


... the play is reflective black, white text with black rounded edge or black with a white edge. This is done with transperant blacks, RGB -- 0.1, 0.1, 0.1 alpha 0.1 !!!

Sorry about the MULTI -- posts lost it for a minute there !!!

Dan Price — Oct 10, 06 2027

Does there exist a Cocoa tutorial for the ZonicKRM SDK 1.0.5 ??

Yes, that would be useful as would be more tutorials focused on shareware app development.

Robert — Oct 10, 06 2028

WooW !!! I didn't find a KRM tutorial but I did find this WILD thread that has some highpower dev. gossip in it !!!

http://www.wodeveloper.com/omniLists/macosx-dev/2004/May/index.html


If anybody wants to do a tutorial for the KRM, I help research issues, prototype examples, if that would be helpful.

Clint — Oct 10, 06 2029

Scott-
the site looks great, i was wondering if you had done it (i visited it the other day before reading this post)

thanks for your work on the guides too, your core data overview got me hooked on cocoa programming

Robert — Oct 10, 06 2030

¡¡¡ WoW !!!

Nice cleanup of the content, BEAUTIFUL !

You could make make a book out of it now.

PGM — Oct 11, 06 2032

Looks very slick. The only problem I have is that the half screen at the top makes me think there must be more and I cannot resist the temptation to scroll up.

Dan Price — Oct 12, 06 2043

Looks very slick. The only problem I have is that the half screen at the top makes me think there must be more and I cannot resist the temptation to scroll up.

Ah, thought it was a rendering bug.

fio — Oct 12, 06 2044

I like it as well. It's really easy top-level info access in a functional innovative design. The gradient across the page btw reminds me a bit of
http://www.bugatti-configurator.com/ (intro page).

Puiz — Oct 13, 06 2057

The new design is nice and clean for sure, but quite honestly, maybe a bit overly so. Not that it isn't visually pleasing: it's tasteful and beautiful.

But first, I thought the old design was a bit more in line with the tutorials themselves. And second, separation between the different sections serve fewer visual clues now. Third and last, there generally seems to be very little contrast.

The Myriad font makes me wonder: unlike in print design, why is it generally accepted OK to mix several sans fonts in one design?

Scott Stevenson — Oct 13, 06 2061 Scotty the Leopard

The Myriad font makes me wonder: unlike in print design, why is it generally accepted OK to mix several sans fonts in one design?

It's not ideal, just the reality of web typography. Users only have certain fonts installed, but you might want to step out of that at least for important headers.




 

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