Monday March 06, 2006 Seapegasus Blog
Monday March 06, 2006 
Speaking of Flash demos, you asked for it: I'll go through our NetBeans Flash demos page, update it, zip all demos and add download links so you can view them offline. As Roman already mentioned, we are about to revamp the whole page anyway. At the end of last year, we postponed finalizing the new design because we wanted to get the content for 5.0 ready; and now it was the 5.5 preview that had a higher priority... *sigh* But this time we're really gonna do it. ;-)
I think we all agree that downloads should be more prominent in the new design. Many say, hey, look at mozilla.org and do it like them. I agree, their page is a good role-modell for guiding new users quickly to the downloads. And similar to netbeans.org's IDE, Platform, Profiler, and Mobility Pack, they too have one major application and some additional ones (Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino), and they do quite a good job of making the other two directly accessible from the front page.
IMHO however, Mozilla's case is a bit easier to handle than ours. Yes, Mozilla too has documentation and FAQs for their products on their page, but seriously, how often do you look at your browser's docs, and how often at your IDE's? A browser's or mail client's features seem kind of obvious. With development tools it's a bit more complex: They have many more features than browsers, and it's part of our job to make additional information about new technologies (Profiler, Mobility Pack) accessible too. This means there's not only documentation and quickstart guides; NetBeans.org also covers tutorials and technical articles for the IDE, as well as resources and how-to's for platform and plug-in module development, then there are books, international Java developer conferences, and finally FAQs and multi-media demos...
The first steps towards a new design are already done, Roman and me will report "live" as soon as we know more. What keeps us going is the saddening thought that the Eclipse community renewed their front page design so nicely before we did... Dang... Not fair. ;-)
Posted by seapegasus ( Mar 06 2006, 12:17:11 PM CET ) Permalink
