Cleanup in aisle 6!
And… welcome to the new MacDailyNews!
We hope you like what we’ve done with the place. Check it out on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. (It’s responsive.)
Thank you so very, very much to our web developer, Kyle Evans (kyle@kyleevans.io), for his excellent, extremely efficient work!
We’re not going to tell you how fast this was turned around because we don’t want to encourage anyone to be as awful clients as we were/are. We gave him an impossible deadline and no time to work, but here we are, soft-launching on the Friday before WWDC, days ahead of our goal!
So, please, let us know what you think!
If you find anything amiss, please just email us (webmaster@macdailynews.com) and we’ll get right on it.
We hope you like the new MacDailyNews!
Oh, my! (Looking around blinking) I think I like it!
Clean. Refreshing. Minty!
Yes, I agree. Crisp and clean!
Love it!
SNAPPY!!
My iMac’s fans (which have now stopped) thank you profusely!
(Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.)
I very much like it.
Wow! Somebody bleached this place! I’m loving it already on my iPhone XS!
Yes, yes, yes!
Very interesting! Well done, guys!
OMG, it’s sooooo much better!
Now Please FIX the iOS App also. Puleeeeeeeeeeeeeze!
Nice. Well done, guys (and gals?) . Looked like a seemless transition. I even turned off my ad blocker and it stayed clean and readable.
Love the variety of sizes of font. It works for older eyes especially.
^^^^^ This! A thousand times, I agree with Mack’s comment above. I love the new look and functionality. The old one with the incessant eye-popping, flashing and blinking cheesy commercials drove me bonkers. I think I’m ready to turn off my ad blocker unless things revert to the prior madness.
FANTASTIC JOB, MDN!!!!! This is the best version of the site you’ve ever done. It is light years ahead of the old version. Well done!
I see that comments are all “in-line” and not threaded as they used to be. This makes it more difficult to follow comments that relate to previous comments.
Perhaps this can be improved upon….?
Comment replies actually are nested. This is just the first reply to a comment in this article. The changes in comments and replies should be easier to follow than before (a time about which we will not speak).
Will we in the future be able to edit our own posts?
Very nicely done.. Clean, concise, I concur!
Ahhhhh! Finally! 👍🏻
OMG!! Thank you so much
Great Job, very clean.
I like it
I like seeing MORE stories at a glance. This means I prefer the OLD way. Your large headlines are a waste of space.
We will definitely be tweaking font sizes. Thank you for your input!
Leave the fonts alone, they look great as is or just give people the opportunity to change them themselves. I like the site exactly as it is right now.
Snappy!
Looks great! I’ll second Brawndo Drinker’s comment—I used to quickly navigate away from Mac Daily News because spending more than a couple of minutes here would cause my Mac’s cooling fans to crank up. No more.
Snappy!
Very nice, I tweaked the font size down one step from the default and it’s perfect on my SE… love the infinite scroll on the news, opinion and how-tos, much leaner and cleaner look too. Well done, seamless to this user. Having migrated a few WordPress sites, kudos to your team for a job well done.
We have always thought of design as being so much more than just the way something looks. It’s the whole thing. The way something actually works on so many different levels. Design defines so much of our experience. A profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, clarity and efficiency. True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. About bringing order to complexity. – Jony Ive
Why do we need a read more button? Is not the text hyper linked? Remove redundancies. What is the purpose of all the empty space?
I’m going to hold judgment until I see if you fixed the app hjacking ads
Looking real good, a refreshing change.
What next, an Android App? 🙂
Hey, aren’t you having a 20 year anniversary soon-ish? The place looks great!
I love what you’ve done with the place. The hangers-on, regrettably, are the same old culture snobs. sigh Oh, well..
Looks great! It took me by surprise and and I had to do a double take to make sure I as on MDN! But immediately I knew I liked it!
Noice!… Very Noice👍
Incredibly snappy!!
MDN..
how about reducing the size of the ‘read more’ button and/or repositioning it and either putting more text from the articles.. or compressing the page to show more articles at glance ?!
It’s snappier!
Five stars from me! (out of five stars)
Always dreaded trying to navigate the old design, it was kind of like System 7.5.5, but I like this!
Thumbs up!
Too much scrolling through headlines. Compact that and you’re good to go.
Meh… reminds me of every reason I hate mobile-first web development. From too-wide article heights that make you scroll forever to see the list of articles, to unbalanced type styles between headlines and text. Bland.
My autism makes it nearly impossible to accept change…but I’m still loving this! It’s smooth as butter on my iPhone, I love it!
Looks like I’m the outlier, but I prefer the old look. More concise. Also, with the old version after I opened an article, it would change color, so next time I opened MDN I could tell where I last was. This doesn’t seem to be happening here. Bummer — just like on the iPad, which I’m about ready to throw in the trash for its many failing in my view compared to the Mac. Oh well, change is inevitable. We don’t always have to like it, but I’m a committed visitor for many years.
We’ve made articles that have been read grey now.
I thought I had somehow gone to a mobile version n my iPad, but after Few minutes of shock I think it will be just fine and has a much cleaner and readable format. A few days of use will hopefully confirm first impressions.
Nice job!
If you would be so kind, please put at the top of your list of tweaks one that will restore the state whereby headlines change color when the article is read.
I visit MacDailyNews multiple times per day and the changed color state allows me to easily determine what articles are new since my last visit.
We’ll have an indicator for articles that have been read ASAP. Thanks!
We’ve made articles that have been read grey now.
Could you make it stand out a little more? For example, if it’s 50% now, could you make it 60%, to see if that makes the distinction easier to see upon a glance at the page? (I know, some of us will never be satisfied…) Thanks. 🙂
It’s generally better, but on the front page I would like to see more than one sentence blurb on the story. Maybe 3 would be ok. Also, I’d like to see the number of comments on the story, because it tells us how “hot” the story/issue is for folks here.
Yes, it’s clean, minty fresh, and I am enjoying it much much more. Regular reader for a long time.
So far so good 👍🏻
Bloody awful! What is this, Kiddies corner?
Bye
Snappy!
Definitely a great layout and readability improvement. Well done.
One thing I would ask you to bring back is something that, for me, made MDN so useful: it was easy to tell which articles I had read. I don’t think that there’s a need for the old red/blue combination for un/visited links, but it would be great to see something like a 50% grey for visited links, maybe even a dark red or dark blue. That way, it would still be easy for visitors to scan down the column to know where they had ‘left off’ reading, and what, amongst what they had already reviewed, had been visited. It was one of the features I felt that made the old theme so much more useful than MDN’s competition (other than the blog entries, of course).
Maybe most recent comments at the top of the list?
Snappy.
Needing to expand all the outside news stories and the useless amount of white space and lack of summaries, well, this new look is abhorrently weak
I like it.
Initially, I like it and might consider taking your site of the default to switch automatically to Reader View. Your previous website version was just to busy and too many ads for me to take. Now, if I can just find a way to default your new version to Dark Mode… (the white background is to bright for my eyes.)
I like it.
I think the big blue “Read More” boxes are overkill and dominates a bit too much. I think most readers are aware that clicking on the headline will take us to the same place, maybe put it after the 3 periods using the same font…read more
Great job, Kyle!!
Congrats MDN. It will take a while to get used to but it’s looking good from the first impression.
As a first comment about the format, there are 60 plus replies here. To get to the newest one I had the option of going the newer comments, again and again, next page load, next page load, next page load.
Having a page counter like at the old “it shall not be named format” to quickly go to the newest comments was a lot more functional for topics that left many replies.
Some of the other stuff, wow, it is looking good.
Thank you. The last few weeks have been a disaster – I’ve literally been unable to read some of it at times, as the format was so messed up that parts were covered by ads.
Now I need to figure out how to have the RSS feed picked back up on my home page… 🙁
Looks good, only thing I don’t like is that ‘Read More’ button taking up so much vertical space. Forces a lot more scrolling to view all the posts. Other than that, I like and have turned off my ad blocker for now.
I have taken the time to try to become accustomed to the new MDN but it’s just not working for me. These are my impressions, many of them longstanding gripes, primarily with desktop mode but most also applicable to the mobile site as well, as always delivered as unvarnished brutal truth:
1) While Apple pushes Dark Mode, MDN just pushes Blinding White Mode. The unreadable small grey text is unacceptable. Do you guys never read your site outside in daylight? All the yellow dividers and grey text & boxes are practically invisible in sunlight. Font size difference between headline and all other text is too big a jump.
2) The enormous amounts of wasted white space are surprising. The dominant feature of the website are the recurring uninspired blue “Read More” buttons, which would be better placed to the right of the article headlines — or just make it go away since every headline is a hyperlink. A well polished website would include a relevant picture next to each headline, not a boring blue box surrounded by white nothingness.
3) Infinite Scroll sucks. No matter what you do, it takes much more effort to figure out where you left off. Nobody likes to constantly scroll and swipe and wait for “load more”. There is a reason that book publishers abandoned parchment scrolls thousands of years ago. Pagination makes sense. Since your archives are chronologically organized, you should paginate content by the day or by the week at least. That’s another Apple initiative, you know, “Today at Apple”. Then when clicking on your archives link, you could offer a much more nifty and precise timeline.
4) On my screen at least, sidebar content is left at the top so it disappears when scrolling down. A well designed sidebar should be permanently pinned.
5) Microsofian ribbon across the top remains an odd mess. For a site that claims “where mac news comes first”, why do you keep trying to divide content into News, Opinion, and How To sections? Almost everything you post about Apple is opinion and speculation already. Wouldn’t it be infinitely more useful to the user to be able to filter to Mac content, iOS content, Apple Investor Content, etc????? Also, how often should one need a link to MDN’s notoriously bad App? That infrequently used stuff belongs on the footer next to Contact Us. Oh, but there is no footer, so every time anyone revisits your site, he always gets to see the same useless header stuff right on top.
6) Make the search tool field always visible to eliminate an unnecessary click. And be consistent — why is the searchfield black?
7) Scrolling ticker tape needs a “stop” option.
8) Total lack of interesting color and texture. Is there a reason you guys don’t like pictures on your main headline page, other than ads?
9) For a site that claims incessantly to hate “Fake News”, you prominently display Facebook and Twitter and Google features. Why isn’t that relegated to a small popup when someone wants to make a comment?
10) Speaking of comments, the nesting of replies needs a lot of work. The grey meme does not work, it is not visible in daylight.
11) The trite little MDN “takes” need to be relegated to a clear box, so the casual reader can easily separate article reposting from your opinionation. Again, grey stripes are not adequate.
12) Still no way to edit one’s own posts? Wow.
13) “Recent Comments” sidebar is poorly formatted and has no way for the reader to filter — why would an iPad devotee, for example, care to read what people are saying about the price of AAPL stock? Just like the headlines on the main page, this also needs filter abilities.
14) Under every blaring bold black headline is a teeny tiny grey date. A proper news site would also include the name of the original author and the publication from which it came, in legible print. Doing it only after the jump is inconsistent, especially when your new infinite scroll feature makes individual article reading a blur.
15) I don’t know what parameters you use to inform your Related content links, but some of the stale stuff you pull up is hilariously bad.
16) I do like that you make your article tags visible. I don’t think however that you have done a consistent job on your tagging. For example, you have tags for stuff like “media”. You have different tags for “TV” and “TV app”. You have tags for certain journalist /industry people, but not all, certainly not consistent as dumbass bimbos like Clueless Yahoo Mayer and Empty Suit Ahrendts always got glossy coverage but key Apple executives like Riccio don’t ever get named. My advice: MAKE CONSISTENT and SIMPLIFY! Apple’s own webpage, as boring and hard to navigate as it is, isn’t this confused in their tagging.
17) Please use qutotation marks properly and consistently. It’s unclear why you revert to single marks when you’re not nesting quotations.
18) Still relying extensively on Google ads? That completely undermines your credibility when you rail against that slimy outfit.
19) Clicking on any comment link does not take the browser to the start of that comment – it jumps the page to a point where the post header is cut off.
20) Apple makes a big deal about privacy and spam control. Yet despite using this marketing as rationale why, in MDN’s opinion, Apple is the greatest digital company that has ever and will ever exist, MDN chooses not to monitor its forums to remove spam (Akismet doesn’t cut it) or abusive comments, foul language, personal attacks, etc. In short, your forums quite often are not child friendly. Your “we do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from children…” statement in your privacy statement is weasel worded bs. You associate with Google, so you know that Google has dossiers on everyone who visits your site. You don’t make it clear to the user what information you save, your statement makes it clear you take no responsibility for securing the date you collect and sell, and even the simplest tasks like identifying what cookies you issue and for what purpose is absent. So much for being an Apple enthusiast site that walks the talk. It will be interesting to see how quickly you implement the Apple Login, since you operate your business in direct contrast to the security and privacy initiatives that Apple markets.