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!
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.