Hello from Austin/SXSW! We had a really great week here, met lots of awesome developers, and got to hang out with several Corona Ambassadors (shout out to Raul and Gerald!). Charles took a bunch of pics, and we’ll be sure to share those soon. There were some crazy parties too – for example, there were big stuffed Angry Birds (like the one on the right) being thrown from the tops of buildings!
While some of us were out here at SXSW, the rest of the team continued to plug away on stuff to make your daily app development routine better, so I wanted to give you an update.
First, forums. The new forums are now live!
One of the biggest improvements is the ability to look at recent posts. The new forums have a Recent activity link at the top that allows you to search by time, filter by forum, and even just look at posts you’re participating in! And if you’re just glancing, there’s also a “Recent topics” sidebar on the forum home page.
There are a couple of other cool things like being able to view the forums from your iPhone or Android browser, richer editing of posts. There are others that we’re still testing out like voting, social features, and search, so don’t go crazy on those just yet!
One big change you might notice is the organization of the threads. We’ve tried to simplify this based on feedback from our Ambassadors, and I’m sure you’ll have your own. We want to make it easy for you to find the right place to post your question and to find the right information, so if you have suggestions, let us know. This is, after all, your forum!
We’ve been wanting to overhaul the forums for a long time. But we also knew there was a treasure trove of information in the old forum, so we spent a lot of time to make the transition as smooth as possible, including migrating old posts and single-sign-on. We’ve done our best to make sure all the kinks are worked out, but we will be monitoring closely throughout the next several days, so please let us know if you see any issues.
Second, Project Gluon (aka plugins).
We are very close to getting plugins supported in the Corona Simulator. This means you’ll be able to specify which plugins you are using in build.settings and our build servers will automatically build and link everything for you. No clumsy downloading and pre-installing plugins on your system!
To support plugins, we have created a new build system. Because this is a major change, we are going to only make this available to beta testers before we include this in Daily Builds.
Our Corona Ambassadors will get a first crack at this, but we want a big sample, so we have decided to let others apply. If you’d like to help beta test, apply here!
The testing will happen in stages. What we’re currently looking for is some insanity checking, to ensure that the device builds from the simulator work exactly the same. After that, our next step (the exciting step) is to test out building with actual plugins.
Finally, we’ll be exhibiting at GDC! We have some fun stuff planned – drop me a line at walter@coronalabs.com if you’re attending!
Jordan Schuetz`
I haven’t been on the forums in over a year due to how hard it is to navigate them. I was very active a few years ago when not as many people used Corona. Once I saw the new forums I almost cried…FINALLY!!!!! The forums are actually good! OMG!
Btw you need to add higher rankings. Jedi shouldn’t be the best one
David Rangel
Glad to hear that Jordan. Hopefully we will have you back.
What would you suggest as the top “ranking”? We are still going to tweak that whole system…
Mo
FANTASTIC FORUM! Love the new SEARCH!
Thank you guys!
Mo
David Rangel
Thanks Mo.
David
Thank goodness for the search feature! Nice job!
mort
A ton of old, and very useful, threads are gone, not to mention one cannot use old bookmarks anymore. Yes, I’ve tried searching by title. E-mails are also public now–I would prefer better privacy controls.
Other than those items, the new forums are nice. Thanks for the revamp (not sarcastic).
David Rangel
Mort – if you have any bookmarks for old posts that were particularly useful and you can not find in the new forums, send me the URL and we’ll see what we can do.
mort
Awesome update to the forums. The search feature is wonderful.
mort
I meant to add that the privacy issues have already been addressed, fantastic support by the ‘Labs team!
Alejandra
OMGGGGG I LOVE the new forum!!!!!!! It’s GREAT!!!!! I will probably be at GDC so I might even get to see you there!!!! SO EXCITED OMG!!!!!!!
Serkan
Does that mean Gluon will be available for Indie/Pro subscribers, as well as Enterprise users?
Thomas Vanden Abeele
Really? You guys think the forum is great??? I think it has never sucked harder. Before I could do a daily checkup of the forum and see all recent activity in one fell swoop, with about 30 post titles in plain sight. Now in the same screen space I see about 5.
I really, really don’t understand this. After the last forum re-design got rewinded because of very valid complaints, once again you do a re-design that goes flat against these older complaints.
Corona, please please please: Yeah, I know whitespace looks nice and all in the layout, and gives your site a nice “printy typography” feel. But if it means I can only get half the content on the screen as before, please do away with the excessive whitespace. Content over style, damnit – this isn’t tumblr.
David Rangel
Thomas – I’m assuming you have already seen the Recent Activity screen right? If you mean that you would prefer to see less white space there, that’s fair. We’ll see if we can compress it a little bit. But the options to surface new activity on that screen are vastly improved over what we had before – and it only takes a scroll to see all the info.
Also, you mention a previous re-design that got rolled back.. not sure I remember what you mean. If there is anything you can point me to, that would be great.
David
Thomas Vanden Abeele
Hi David,
Disclaimer: absolutely love Corona, absolutely hate the new forum design. Incidentally, I’m the co-founder of a 20-strong design agency, so I know my way around this stuff.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. Yes, naturally I saw the “recent activity” tab. I just did the test: on my MacBook pro 15″ I can see a glorious 4 posts titles on my full screen – meaning that not only I need to scroll a lot, but also that I lose oversight. Tremendous waste of space also by needing three lines to name title, category and original poster, instead of just one row containing three columns, if you know what I mean. What is the info people need to see on this page? The title of the post, I’m guessing, and potentially the first three lines of text of the post. Date of posting, time of posting, original poster are all less relevant. If it’s on this page you know it’s recent. If it’s on top you know it’s very recent.
Please take a look at Google. Google search shows 9 results including a short description + some images on my MacBook, and displays a healthy menu navigation, AND it even has whitespace to spare. Seriously, open two tabs, one showing a google search and one showing your own “recent activity” page, and see the humongous difference in screen real estate wasted or used efficiently.
Then click through on a post in this forum: just when you think it can’t get any worse, it does! Here the amount of whitespace versus content is 95 to 5 percent on some posts (granted, the ones with just one line responses). I find myself scrolling and scrolling and generally losing a coherent thread in a, uhm, thread.
Oh boy…My daily routine was opening up the forum, scanning the 30-something posts I could see and replying or reading if I saw something sparking my interest. I don’t know too much about interface design but I do know that a screen like “recent activity” should be designed for quick scanning, not searching, browsing or grazing. It is an oversight, except it doesn’t give any oversight as it is now. I can’t image what this must look like on 1024 x 768. On 1440 x 900 pixels more than half of the screen is covered by navigation panels and button, and less than half by content. I hope you realise this means something is terribly wrong.
My comment about the previous re-design is about a change to the forum where the “recent activity” had disappeared – due to many negative comments it was changed back a day or two later, and for good reason – this way a couple of months ago.
I can go on about this. Does a “recent activity” page need a button for posts of “past 6 months” or “past year”? This screams “advanced search” and not “recent activity”.
Quick Jump: opens a new window instead of a dropdown that would be a lot faster. Also quick jump doesn’t really offer much functionality that isn’t already on the page (a link to “all forums”, “recent activity” and “blog”? But those buttons are all already there! –> once again, loss of space that could be use to show content).
Now, the button “resources” that takes you to a new page “docs” if you need the APIs. What do your analytics say about the API docs? Doesn’t this page deserve a quick jump? Now you’re probably going to say: “well documentation is in quick jump!”. I know. But naming a new window “quick jump” doesn’t mean that it is a quick jump. Needing two clicks to go some place is actually a “slow jump”, compared to the other buttons on the page – perhaps you could rename this feature
Seriously, David, there are major issues with legibility and interface design on the new site. The old one wasn’t perfect, but while looking less polished it did function a lot better.
If you need screenshots of offending issues let me know where to send ‘em. I’d be happy to pinpoint problems. Don’t mean to be rude or vitriolic, but I really think the forum is very poorly designed from a functional point of view. More polish, yes, so novices will love the new design. But it is not an improvement.
Thomas Vanden Abeele
Pheew, I’m sorry David, but I’m on a roll here – it’s hard not to when even a 30 second stroll in the recent activity page (yes, that’s my main peeve) reveals more idiosyncracies.
Firstly, could you please tell me in what way the “new activity” page is vastly improved, because I’m not seeing it, actually.
Secondly, why on earth did you choose to NOT allow forum visitors to scroll past 24 hours if they choose this time limit (and so on for the other periods)? There is no valid reason whatsover to do this, in fact it’s just a nuisance. Or better put, your “one week” button is actually just a crippled version of the “2 weeks” button. And your “24 hours” button is a crippled version of the “1 week” button. It does exactly the same, but doesn’t allow you to read post that is 8 days old, even if you know it’s just one more page away at the end of the “week posts”. The whole left field looks like a feature, but it does not have any advantage in reality. Sorry to be so harsh, but why would a person need to limit his posts to exactly one day or one week? If you arrange ‘em like this, and allow people to scroll further than just the top 15 most recent posts (as it was before), then be consequent and DO allow people to scroll further.
I’m going to stop checking the forum now
David Rangel
Thomas – I really appreciate the feedback. I’ll see what we can do in the coming days about some of these things. I particularly hear you on the white space.
As for some of the other things, we are limited by the actual forum software to some degree. Some things we can customize, but not everything. Unfortunately, as you know, there will always be differing opinions on usability.
But I hear you 100%. Thank you for taking the time to post all this.
Thomas Vanden Abeele
You’re very welcome David, thanks for responding so quickly – it’s very cool that you guys are so accessible!
David Rangel
Thomas – you’ll be glad to know we’ve addressed the white space issue on the Activity page. At least a first pass at it.
David
Thomas Vanden Abeele
Hi David,
Thanks – I’ll let you know how I like it (not to start an endless b*thcfest; I would like to contribute a bit to the usability of the forum in a positive way) after testing!
David Rangel
Thanks Thomas. All feedback is welcome – no matter how brutal, or whether there is a pile-on
Chris Leyton
I like the extended search, but breaking the links to the existing forum threads is an absolute pain in the arse – having to make extensive use of Google Cache at the moment.
Also not happy about my threads being lost yesterday – don’t think they made the db dump
If any CL staff read this – please have a look at my “Renewal” thread – can’t understand why I’m being asked to renew my license?!?
David Rangel
Chris – I agree. But there was no way we could keep all the old links working. We also tried to do as much as possible in terms of exporting/importing all content and all the way up to the cutoff, but we were bound to miss some things.
Can you email me so I can help with your renewal issue? david AT coronalabs
David Rangel
Chris, just FYI – if there are any very useful old threads what you cannot find, please post them here:
http://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/32669-troubled-by-broken-links/
We have recovered most of them and are compiling them there right now. Soon I will compile them into a better, more accessible place. But that’s a good place to bring them up right now.
Also, I dont think I got an email from you on the renewal issue you mentioned. Let me know if I can help there.
David
Jason
“…so please let us know if you see any issues”
Well since you asked…
The search seems to be working better, which is nice.
The layout, on the other hand, could use some changes. The white space and large font size requires to much scrolling. For example the page title font size is 31.5px which is pretty large in my opinion. You could reduce it in half and it still be easy to read. Also just reducing the .post_body .post to 12px (from 14px) greatly reduces the overall scrolling requirement, since that is most of the pages content.
Also not a huge fan of the black background for displaying code inline. It is much easier to to read dark text on a light background. Take a look at Github or similar sites and see how much easier the code is to read.
In regards to bookmarks and results from Google search no longer working, you could always do a url rewrite that grabs the title from the url and uses it to perform a search. That would be better than just redirecting to the main page, IMHO.
Just some thoughts
David Rangel
Thanks Jason. Thomas (above) also had feedback on the white space and I’m going to see what we can do. Same for readability.
Vladimir
I agree with @Thomas Vanden Abeele. The old design was good. Maybe needed some search improvements. Now with 4-5 result (without scrolling down) in “Recent Activity” page it is difficult to say that this is a Forum.
Daniel
Like Thomas I really love Corona but I have to agree with him, the new forum is a complete and utter eyesore with a poor design, in my opinion a hideous color scheme and the recent activity section is much too bulky and doesn’t display enough in one section.
The choice of invision power board surprises me for a company in the tech space, the lack of true customisation options will prevent you from performing many of the “tweaks” you talk about and honestly the old forum was broken but no where this hideously ugly or useless, minus the search and view count being broken for over a year.
You have also changed the forum categories to be, I think, counter intuitive and messy. You have 44 on the main page now which is far too many, yet you still managed to do away with forums we actually use.
Is this just another “experiment” like Walter has stated in the past, about daily builds or two weeks on features, two weeks on debugging? How long are we going to be stuck with this utterly messy eyesore?
David Rangel
Hey Daniel. Thanks for the feedback. While I agree on needed changes to white space and design (and we will do those), I do think that at some point this just becomes a difference in opinion that cannot be bridged. We have also received lots of positive feedback on the new forums. So hopefully we get to something closer to what you would like to see with some tweaks in the next few weeks. There is no perfect solution, nor is there a perfect way to export/import everything that builds up in old, unwieldy forums over years.
David
ojnab
I agree with Thomas. Everything is to big in the new forum design.
It is impossible to get an overview of things.
Besides google search links are broken and the search function in the forum is not working probably ( hope it will be better? ) so it is almost impossible to find relevant information in the forums. Sorry to say this, but I liked the old design much better.
tetu
the new fora suck big time
google search doen’t get you anywhere. is this for real?
old posts are not redirected nor they can be edited. why? we want them dead?
should we expect more porn?
jleigh
Gotta agree with some here – breaking google search is a deal breaker – search anything on google related to corona and EVERY result link leads to the generic forum home page. Search for the same terms now that you’re in the forums and the search comes up empty.
Going to make it near impossible to find out anything but how to do the basics – just when I was getting into heavy duty deep topics like multi-threading.
Very disappointing after just paying for the engine…
David Rangel
jleigh – yes, for now google links are not working. That is an unfortunate side effect, but it will get better soon as google re-indexes. You can, in the meantime, use the forum search, which should work.
Sorry about the inconvenience, but I am sure you will still get a lot of value out of using Corona.
David
J. A. Whye
Not to pile on (grin), but the “recent” posts in the forum is much worse than the old one. The old one made it easy to see at a glance what threads had seen activity — and on my monitor I believe I could see the entire list at once. Now with the same size browser window I can see the first 5.
I do like the widget on the left that allows me to choose last 24 hours, etc., but the actual content on the Recent Activity page is too spread out.
In general I like the new forum more — just not the “what’s been happening?” page.
Jay
David Rangel
Hey Jay – we will fix the white space in the Recent Activity page very soon. Then it will ALL be better
David Rangel
Jay, we’ve taken out a lot of white space in the Recent Activity page now.
Alex M
Typical corona labs, upgrade something, breaks EVERYTHING. Widget 2.0 was a total disaster and the new forums are even more so. Cant even search the old forums with google, it’s just broken.
I agree with tetu, sleigh, ojnab, Thomas, Daniel, Vladimir and Jason, it is really a very ugly forum now and it feels quite broken. As already asked, will there be porn?
David Rangel
Thanks Alex, we love you too. And I don’t know how we stay in business, after all we are constantly breaking everything – it’s crazy
Sorry to disappoint you, no porn is planned.
David Rangel
Hi everyone. Just another quick update on forums. We have re-activated the old forums on a read-only basis. In this way any existing links (in old posts or on Google) will now still work. Of course, you won’t be able to post. The plan is to leave the old forums up for a month or two. Once visits to it start dying out, we will take them down and just leave the new forums.
Thanks for bearing with us as we work through the transition.