I'm volunteering to create a macgap website.

[gobijan]

Hi,
I am volunteering to create a dedicated macgap website. I could also take over hosting or we could use github pages.

Any requirements?

Cheers Bijan

[jeff-h]

Awesome!

I'd prefer to have only one person principally responsible for the site — I think that will empower a more creative and cohesive outcome than "design by committee". Are you OK being that person? Obviously we'll support you with development energy if/when required.

Using GitHub as the host would be pretty convenient from a collaboration / maintenance point of view (e.g. if you're on holidays and something needs changing on production).

I'm glad to see you're into Bootstrap — I was thinking that it would be the best foundation for a MacGap promo site, since so many people will be familiar with it (enabling more people to submit PRs for the site codebase).

As far as requirements go, I haven't really thought too deeply honestly. I've tried to condense the main differentiating features of MacGap into the three items in the Features list at https://github.com/maccman/macgap/wiki Other than that, I'm happy however you want to progress, but it might be good to provide some opportunity for feedback primarily from a wording / content point of view.

Do you think we should translate the site content?

By the way, I just discovered your https://github.com/tschundeee/maverix project — sounds awesome, and very relevant to MacGap. What's the best way to make that visible for people coming to MacGap? Obviously a page in the wiki, but I'm never sure how much people actually use the wiki. Perhaps a feature block on the site, or at least room in the design for one, ready for when Maverix has a release.

[gobijan]

Hi Jeff,
sounds good. For sure I'm OK being that person. I will prepare something minimalistic, lean and clean (just did this site yesterday http://www.hannes-drescher.de) that will be up and running soon and that provides a good foundation for further additions.

The site will be

• be mobile ready
• including @2x images
• single page (for now)
• using bootstrap
• minimalistic
• include links to the github repo and the wiki
• will later get an additional "built with macgap" page

Thanks for your interest in my maverix web osx gui project.

You can find a preview here:
http://screenisland.com/maverix/
Let me know what you think. Concerning maverix we can discuss a bit via mail: [email protected]

Cheers Bijan

[gobijan]

How do you like this direction? :)

[perfaram]

Looks a lot like the old PhoneGap logo - way to much IMHO
I think it would be better if the logo's white screen was in landscape position instead of portrait

EDIT : But it looks great !

[gobijan]

I just took the bundled logo and did some color modifications. I have the skills to design a logo (e.g. I recreated the skype logo for fun: http://t.co/LmYvvq1eKy ) but some input would be welcome what the new logo should define and stand for.

[gobijan]

Also one question: do we want to make a precompiled app-skeleton downloadable or shall we just point to the gem and the xcode project?

[jeff-h]

It's all looking great so far. A few points of feedback and/or personal opinion (bearing in mind this isn't design-by-committee you can take it with a grain of salt :)

• the MacGap icon is, I believe, an exact replica of the PhoneGap one. It is, as @perfaram pointed out, quite wrong for MacGap, if for no other reason than it is a mobile phone screen! I've contacted an excellent icon designer to see if they might be willing to do an icon design for MacGap pro bono, and if so we will want to feature that prominently on the website, as well as put it in the Xcode project of course. In the meantime however, I'm less sure what to suggest as the feature for the site... I toyed with the idea of an app window shot but really — our default app is empty!
• just personally, my design thoughts:
  • love the typography—the Helve Strong/ultralight contrast is great and ties in nicely with Apple's recent Helve obsession
  • the dark blues used are quite subdued for me; something more iOS-ishly bright might be nice lol
• I'm very uncertain about the gem. I personally have never even downloaded it. I'm about to post a separate issue to see if anyone actually does use it.
• I'm keen for us to get a sample app on GitHub — hopefully even get it on the app store. This is all future potential stuff of course.

Thanks again for the work so far.

[jeff-h]

I've created a new GitHubt organisation for MacGap and there's a website repo set up for you when you're ready. Let me know if you have any trouble accessing it.

[gobijan]

Okay I'm back from a short trip and will now refine the design... About the blue: I choose it in order to show that we are offering a desktop experience. iOS has all these funky bright colors which are currently not really used on the desktop. But I'll experiment a little and upload some drafts.
Concerning the logo: As the logo is currently work in progress (WIP) maybe I'll simply choose a screenshot of an empty macgap app window with a centered header.

For those who want to discuss about logo design maybe this article is useful:
https://bold.pixelapse.com/minming/the-makings-of-a-great-logo

[gobijan]

Changes:

• Better matching newer Apple Color Schemes.
• Screenshot of MacApp added
• Smaller Temporary Logo
• Refined Font Colors
• Added Github Logo and Documentation Logo

Todo:

• TBD: Download link (xCode Project with compiled App included for people with no Xcode installed?)
• Add follow on twitter link (will be coded and not mocked)
• Add links to an Build With Page (after release of website version 1)

[rawcreative]

If you're going to use the Phonegap logo at least change it to reflect OSX, something like this:

[jeff-h]

@tschundeee liking this refined design! You made good points re colour, but this really appeals to me without looking too iOS-like.

Re the logo, I am finding it really hard to come up with any fundamental ideas for it. Perhaps open a different issue for that? In the meantime I like @rawcreative 's modification of the logo — we should definitely use that or something like it for now.

The app screenshot is kinda funny. I like it conceptually, as part of the design. But... it's like a bit of nothing! :p We're putting all this work into a project that at the end of the day gives you a blank window. Not very exciting lol It's a tricky one — I considered the idea of showing a slider of several real MacGap apps, but I know if it was one of mine, I'd rather not have it publicised this way. In some way it's contradicting that we want to prove that you can't tell the difference between a MacGap app and a fully-objc one.

One idea is that we could flesh out the page with a list of the JS API commands we are exposing, since that's what's most unique about MacGap, other than its tiny app sizes (which in MG2 are even smaller... currently 310KB!). It would probably be a lot of work but if we had a small visual representation for each of the (currently) 12 items on https://github.com/maccman/macgap/wiki/API-Reference together with a sentence or two each, that could look pretty attractive. I'm certainly happy to replace a bunch of lorem ipsum with actual wording if you'd like to go this way.

Re your to-do's:

TBD: Download link (xCode Project with compiled App included for people with no Xcode installed?)
Add follow on twitter link (will be coded and not mocked)

I think this is actually a great idea. We could even modify the path for the html/css/js in this version of the app so it looks in a directory beside the compiled app, making it super trivial to get started. Once hooked, then you'd need to learn the finer points of getting Xcode running and compiling the project yourself, but till then this would be a very easy entry.

[gobijan]

@jeff-h very good point about the API Items. I'll think about it and will come up with something. BTW: I just tested the design by creating a marketing site for my personal-kanban app:
http://screenisland.com/personal-kanban/

At the moment my kanban app is implemented with node-webkit because of file dialogs support. You have macgap2 stable enough so I could try to port over to it? :)

[gobijan]

@rawcreative you have the logo in svg? That would be perfect to work with.

BTW: I like it ;)

[gobijan]

@jeff-h: the api is no browsable within the app-window so there is also a visual connection. I chose a select dropdown because it is also very mobile friendly and compact (as the window is) and it can scale to whatever amount of api objects.

[rawcreative]

@tschundeee I'll probably be pushing the MacGap2 repo to the new organization today. The v1 api has been ported over and there's a bunch of new stuff in there as well. Just note that it's in an alpha state right now, as I've been working solely on getting it finished and have done very little testing other than to ensure the commands are working.

[jeff-h]

This is all so very awesome! Great work @tschundeee and @rawcreative — it's much appreciated. Love the API browser idea — very clever way to make the app window useful and illustrative. Personally I reckon I would actually use this as my API lookup on my own MG projects if we got it working nicely.