Netizen Newsfeed

The old skin has finally been stripped away. We also did some rearranging and separated form elements in the UI from more complicated widgets.  In the "Package Parcel" screen for example, the drag and drop area from is no longer clutters the input form elements as an inline widget.  This allowed us to add a description field to allow users to add metadata about the parcel.  This information will be viewable on the web and it will be displayed right before a user initiates their download.

Although the actual Netizen Desktop code is in good shape for a March release, our unified MacOSX and Windows desktop UI still needs a lot of work.  Below is a screenshot of the UI as of this afternoon.  Notice how we removed the sidebar and relocated its contents above the navigation toolbar.  We're still contemplating whether or not to keep that faint border between the menu bar and the toolbar.  It seems to have a cleaner look without that 1 pixel border, but for now we'll stick to the current Windows UI style guide. 

We still have icons, design elements, and tons of CSS left to do to complete the UI refresh. This release is designed to integrate well with our new website design and especially with the MacOSX look and feel, but it should also look pretty under Vista and XP. I'll post another screenshot as I make progress with the reskinning work throughout the next couple of weeks.  I can't wait to get rid of that blue, Windows XP color.  It's hurting my eyes.

We have devoted the last few releases of Netizen to improving its reliability and convenience features so that it would be more appropriate for day-to-day use. Visually, however, the look of the application has stayed pretty stagnant since Beta Release 3. We realized we needed some outside help to make Netizen’s beauty match its brain.

Luckily, we ran into Anthony Casalena of SquareSpace fame at a local nextNY event over the summer. As you may already know, our blog is hosted by Squarespace. We have looked at every open source blogging and CMS system out there and SquareSpace is hands down the most polished and user-friendly. So we asked Anthony to recommend a designer that can help us bring Netizen up a few notches in the visual department. Anthony wholeheartedly recommended Wolfgang Bartelme of Bartelme Design to help with this project. (Thanks for the referral, Anthony!) Wolfgang has been working with us during the last couple of months on re-conceptualizing and re-skinning the Mac version of our applicaton. We feel that this new design is what we need to be more user friendly and to match the polish of the Mac OS X platform.

Without further ado, here is a sneak preview of the next major version of Netizen:

Icons

 

We refreshed our icon set to include more graphical representations of our basic Send, Pickup and Track functions. These icons are supposed to look like the shipping boxes/envelopes you would normally use to pack your documents or binders with FedEx or DHL.

Buttons

Tiger or Leopard? Apple seems to be changing the look-and-feel of the OS native buttons from the candy color version in Tiger to the matte treatment in Leopard.

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So it seems the ripple effects from this month’s Gnomedex are still being felt. The conference itself was covered by The Seattle Post Intelligencer, but the products that debuted at Gnomedex have been reviewed by not only the conference attendees but they have also been Digg’ed, Slashdotted, blogged about by tech community at large.

There have been several positive discussions that began at the conference and have continued into the blogging world. One such topic which Christopher (Tse) and I are involved closely with is the OPML icon design. Read up on the debate about the various OPML designs at Chris Pirillo's blog. In the next week, we will be helping launch a new site that will bring this discussion to the masses and perhaps build upon Dave Winer’s OPML.org campaign.

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