TAB Version 5

Written on October 10, 2006 by Josh Pigford and 22 people have commented

If you’re reading this, you most likely realize that The Apple Blog has a bit of a different look to it. Nothing majority drastic on the UI side of things…mainly just a significant facelift.

The biggest new feature, though, is the addition of the community! With around 8,000-10,000 readers every day it just seemed liked the right step forward to offer a place for everybody to chat about other things besides the articles we post.

As with all communities, we need your participation to make it work. So get your post on!

As with new versions of anything, I’m quite positive there are some bugs.

There are still quite a few CSS issues with Internet Explorer (what’s new?), and Firefox isn’t playing nice with a few small things. Safari should treat you like a king (or queen), though.

Over the next couple of days we’ll be ironing out the wrinkles so be patient with us.

At any rate, we’re really stoked about this. So let us know your thoughts!

Edit: One thing I forgot to mention is that if you look in the right column we’ve got a jazzy Flickr feed. Where do those pictures come from? Well The Apple Blog Flickr group of course! So, go ahead and join the group and post pics of everything Apple related and have them show up on the site!

Comments RSSComments

#1 Derek Punsalan says:
Nice new look. The blue and khaki(?) look good together. I’ll have to wander into the community now.
#2 Josh Pigford says:
Thanks Derek. The colors are officially “Blue” and “Awesome”…”Awesome” being that khaki color you’re referring to. :p
#3 Eric Gideon says:
Looks good, Josh, except at low browser widths - then it really screws up.
#4 Keith Mason says:
nice work, I like it.
#5 Paul Stamatiou says:
Looking good! The last one was too K2.
#6 Jamie Huskisson says:
I’m always a fan of your designs, and this one is no exception Looks brilliant
#7 Jamie Huskisson says:
Massive bug just found - the links the community forums send out for account validation are wrong, they send out .dev instead of .com - which simply returns a 404.
#8 Rob says:
Your site has always looked great. I have just one comment about the new design by having all the ads (especially the banner ad up top) and side bar info all on a white field it takes away from the importance that your main content should have. If your main content was the only thing on a white field and the rest was on say a light grey field your content would take center stage.

Just my two cents. It looks great either way.
#9 David Babylon says:
Looks good.
#10 Kris Jones says:
I seem to be missing a left-hand margin. The text of articles is hard up against the left-hand side of the browser in both Safari and Firefox. However, there is a very narrow margin beside the posted comments. Aside from that, it does look a bit monochrome. Perhaps you need to make a bit more use of a contrasting colour. Otherwise it’s all good.
#11 itsanaddams says:
me likes!!!
#12 Jon Kantro says:
Loving the new design! The layout is slick.
#13 Jamie Huskisson says:
Looks much better without the ad above the right hand side column
#14 David says:
I’m liking the new look! Slick as a whistle.
#15 leon says:
The new design looks good, but one thing i dont like is the enormous line spacing in the news section. this way its very hard to read and the structure of an article is not as clear as it has been before.
#16 bv says:
very nice new look. a lot more professional than the previous.
many kudos!
peace.
bv.
#17 aaron says:
the site looks great except for the arrows following the links. muy distracting.
#18 GCFiedler says:
Color scheme is great, community thing could be nice, but I want nothing to do with Flickr or other Yahoo entities.
#19 Wysiwyg says:
I second aaron about the arrows. They´re distracting as hell.
#20 thomas says:
Not that you are competing or anything but I’m liking TAB a whole lot better than any other Mac Blogs out there. TUAW is getting worse and worse. If any of you have seen Laurie A. Duncan’s posts, you will know what I mean esp this one (http://www.tuaw.com/2006/10/11/muslim-community-offended-by-apples-fifth-avenue-nyc-cube/). She supposedly “fixed” it by adding a question mark which is especially comical if you see this clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBcIDX06FTs).
Anyway many thanks for the great writing and keep up the good work.
#21 Shawn says:
I really like the re-design. Very visually pleasing. Kudos.
#22 Eddie Hargreaves says:
There is no margin on the left side of the page, so the text of a post runs right against the edge of the screen. It’s kind of annoying. Maybe this isn’t a problem for those of you with giant monitors, but I can’t enlarge the resolution of my 12″ iBook.