It certainly looks dated, but compared to the new design there are a few good things about it:
- High information density
- Screenshot at the top
- Link to legal review and licenses (questions that any enterprise customer would have)
- No gratuitous animation sequences
I wonder if it would have been possible to update the ReactOS site's design while retaining its informational quality. Just improving the typography and working on the padding between boxes could have made a real difference.
More generally, I wish the tide of web design trends would turn towards information density once again. Edward Tufte, a legend in the field and proponent of visual density, famously called PowerPoint presentations "chart junk" because they spend slide after slide on charts with minimal information in each.
Modern websites willingly do the same, forcing the user to scroll through a dozen screenfuls just to glean some basic information about a product. Animation makes this even worse, because the user has to sit and wait while the site slowly delivers information in animated word-sized chunks.
The kernel targets the Windows NT 5.2 (Server 2003 + XP 64-bit) ABI, which is backwards compatible with NT 5.0 (2000) and 5.1 (XP) drivers as well.[1]
The userland API and ABI always targets the current version of Windows, which is presently Windows NT 10.0 (Windows 10 + Server 2016)[2], and should be backwards compatible with applications designed for any previous version of NT (there's some support for DOS, 16-bit Windows, and Windows 9x too. Thanks to borrowing code from Wine, it tends to actually have a higher compatibility with applications from these eras than the current version of Windows does!)
[1] In general, Microsoft Windows x.y versions tend to be backwards compatible with drivers for all previous versions of X. For example, Server 2003 is 5.2, thus backwards compatible with 2000 and XP drivers. Windows 10 is a special case now; unless declared by an application manifest as explicitly Windows 10 aware, it lies to applications by claiming to be Windows 8.1, or NT 6.3. This way, driver installers can see that first component of the Windows version being 6 and assume compatibility; Windows 10 is still compatible with all drivers from Vista, 7, and 8.x, even though they bumped the internal version to 10.0 to match the marketing name.
[2] As of the present, this only applies to the classic Desktop APIs. Support for Metro/Modern/Universal (whatever name they pick this week...) is not planned nor in development. Given the very limited set of apps (pretty much just Google Chrome) for this API outside of the Windows Store, I don't find it likely this will change.
Disclaimer: I am not an authority of ReactOS, I've just followed the project for a long time. I need to figure out where this info has gone in the current web site design...
Thanks for the feedback. Right now in the main page you can see the "Imagine running your favorite Windows applications and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust. That's ReactOS. Not just an Open but also a Free operating system."
Probably it should link to the FAQs under "Discover More" if anyone is interested in the Technical details. I am noting down to perform the change asap, because it looks as a nice improvement. Thanks!
> Animation makes this even worse, because the user has to sit and wait while the site slowly delivers information in animated word-sized chunks.
This is exactly what pissed me off within the first 3 seconds, that there is no way to see everything they have to say without waiting until the animation goes whole cycle and then waiting some more to make sure I didn't miss anything.
It looks like they took design tips from people optimizing for addictiveness, not usefulness. Hint: you don't need their tips if you are a FOSS project and actually lose money on people spending more time on your site than necessary.
I was under impression that rewarding people for patiently watching your animations may be an attempt at exploiting Sunken Cost Fallacy or even just giving them some time to forget about the rest of the world.
The reason I thought that was because this site somehow reminds me of all the sites nagging me to buy something and I suppose there are reasons why those behave the way they do.
Hi!
You can move through animations thanks to the slider below it. So you can jump to the animation you want to see again.
On the other hand, a home page is just that...the main page any kind of visitors will arrive, from great IT guys (as you) to no-IT guys at all. If you know about the project already it's pretty obvious the level of the info in the home page has been lowered to ease the understanding of the scope of the project. Tell a non-IT guy we're creating an operating system clone aiming NT architecture and they won't catch what is this about at all. All the tech details are waiting you in the new "Developing" section of the site then ;)
Please, at least get rid of the scroll hijacking. It is extremely annoying. Also why are you serving 4K lines of CSS, embedded on every page? I also hope you could use a static site generator instead of Drupal (which definitely is an overkill for such a site).
Frankly, those animations are so simple that they could be replaced with static images (the first one would need a split in two). This way I can choose which one to watch simply by moving my eyeballs or maybe scrolling in case of small screens. Two simple, widely know and efficient interfaces.
Maybe I shouldn't be too harsh, after all it was me who as a teenager hacked this panel displaying information about currently selected file in Windows 98 Explorer to slide in/out during navigation like menus in StarCraft, but c'mon - it's one thing to create such stuff and another to actually really use it. Even I couldn't bear those sliding panels for long :)
Not quite. "Chartjunk" is Tufte's term for anything in a chart that doesn't communicate information. PowerPoint presentations can be (and often are) bad in ways that have nothing to do with chartjunk, and lots of chartjunk occurs outside PowerPoint presentations.
Maybe the old website catered to developers while the new one to users. The old site didn't have a text to focus on. While the new one moved my eyes directly to "Do you think" animation. Actually made me interested to download the OS.
I definitely like the old site more. The new design feels like yet another generic "me too" startup-ish marketing site, of which I think there are far too many today. To me, the large fonts, animations, and images are like the visual equivalent of screaming --- it certainly catches attention, but quickly tires the viewer. The old site feels far more sedate and pleasant.
I wonder if I'm getting old, or if attention spans are getting shorter, because the new site is quite optimised for the latter.
Hi Pavlov!
We hoped also that the tide of the "bloated info" came back during these latest 10 years...and we didn't have any luck :) Otherwise we wouldn't have spent too much work on the new ReactOS website.
We've replaced the "Screenshot" to a "Gallery" link, which I personally think it is much better. Try to find the "Gallery" in the older one ;)
Legal links are coming, but to mention some we've added a legal link needed by the German Law (that we didn't include in the past).
For us sadly asking people to join us is not "gratuitous" but a serious need as we don't have any support of companies. We're the first ones willing to remove the "Help us fundraising", "Join us"...but sadly we're probably one of the biggest open source projects out there without any kind of support but the Community one.
Btw, it is planed to create a "hide the slideshow" via button or once registered.
On the other hand, the current information quality ranges from newbies to high skilled developers, while the old information one was just focused to (and understandable by) developers. Density is not synonym of quality, and our old site had tons of info and pages duplicated, with some of them just reachable through one link. The new site pretends to ease the contact for newcomers while greatly increase the level of the info as you move deeper. The fact is that the new site links to more Wiki articles, and have more info than the old one. Stats say!Just under its proper category.
Thanks for your feedback.
I spent a good three minutes on the new website without fully understanding what this was about. A Linux distro? Something related to React.js? And why the hell is everything bouncing around every time I click a link?
On the old website I found everything I needed to know in 0.2 seconds. Didn't even have to click on anything.
Since the beginning I had a dream of doing IE compatibility tests with ReactOS but other options showed up and IE lost its relevance in relevant parts of the Internet.
This doesn't bother me as much — FOSS projects don't need a rockstar designer for their website, do they?
Unless a "designer" "developed" the website for them and they got blindsided, which I'm sure happens more than I care to understand. I've seen it happen at well-funded companies — employees claiming they designed something, management had no idea they didn't really do much work at all, etc.
Of course you don't have to reinvent the wheel. I just wanted others to know if they like the design. And maybe they should change the default picture above "following".
BTW I think they did quite well. I especially like the "live activity" box at the footer that shows recent changes.
They never needed much of a designer anyway, since if you look at the old site, which I think worked perfectly well, it was generated by "RosCMS". That was their own, GPL licensed, CMS.
Replacing that with a commercial template doesn't seem very FOSS to me.
What bothers me about this site is that the first thing they do is put down Windows, instead of highlighting their own features.
What they say about windows "Closed source, licensed, spy [sic]" may be true, but it doesnt tell me anything about their product. I could as well think "oh, I dont want to be spied upon, lets switch to linux".
Those sliders also did not make it obvious to me that it can run windows server 2003 applications (according to wikipedia).
Cringe at their FAQ. I don't want my OS supplier to pretend to be hip. Super weird especially because they aren't a for-profit so it's not even a scheme to get to your money, they are just clueless a bit. Casual approach has to be earned through human contact.
ReactOS has made great progress. The last time I tested it I wondered if it could ever be useful. Now it provides an instant desktop with XP compatiblity, variable desktop sizes and flawless network access.
In my opinion XP was the best Windows ever. I think there are many people with legacy PCs who think the same, and who would love to have a XP alternative with real sustainability, even more due to Microsoft's attempt to lock every Win7 user into the privacy-less Win10 ecosystem.
The ReactOS team should consider to make a business of it. There are so many options. Company support, driver development, 3D, better OSX/Linux cooperation, Docker-like applications w/o desktop etc. They could provide a whole new ecosystem around Windows while retaining independency from MS.
All this animated stuff makes the new site really annoying. Does anybody actually like this stuff? Or is it just the developers who want to show off how much Javascript they know?
I've seen similar websites done for my former high school and former employee. I think in both cases it was webmasters showing off and justifying their existence combined with website owners being impressed by their 1337-skillz and maybe having some complexes that they aren't modern enough.
It also didn't help that owners weren't actually users of the website and that the design was probably demoed to them on developer's machine over localhost where it may have performed reasonably fast.
I don't mind the animations but I just can't stand it when websites mess with the scrolling. The page does not behave as I expect when I scroll using the trackpad on my macbook. I don't know how it behaves with a mouse scrollwheel but I assume it feels strange.
There is no universal way to reliably mimic scrolling with javascript. There's too many different browsers and devices, all of them treat scrolling differently.
Also 72 (72!!!!) requests to load the page, including: 1.3 MB of javascript and css, 2 MB of images, 6 custom fonts, and most annoyingly the scrolling is completely messed up. Please, never ever do custom scrolling. It's an instant turn off. If this was a site selling me something, the scrolling would have lost a potential sale from me.
Oh my god. You're not kidding - this reminds me of the days of animated GIFs on Geocities pages.
Aesthestics / readability aside, I worry that those animations will be painfully slow / battery draining on old slow machines with underpowered GPUs, and I would've thought that's the ReactOS target market. The folks stuck on Windows XP boxes who can't upgrade to Windows 10, and for whom a lightweight XP/2000 compatible OS that still gets security updates would be ideal.
Hi! Vicmarcal from ReactOS here.
Which issues are you having navigating with the new ReactOS site? I'm using Ipad, and while there is too many work to be done in the responsive area(some bootstrap fixes mainly), I see it working in my Ipad. :)
"( a step by step and video guide can be found here)" - nevermind things like the space after the opening paranthesis, let's not be picky... but there is no link.
"Here you can find a guide about how to request a position to translate the site, and here an awesome tool created by XXXX" - again, no links, and I have some doubts whether XXXX is an actual person : ) It surely doesn't inspire much trust in a prospective user who is assumed to ask questions such as "Free and Open-whaaat...?" or "is ReactOS legal?".
56 comments
[ 1049 ms ] story [ 2609 ms ] threadhttps://web.archive.org/web/20060421204854/http://www.reacto...
It certainly looks dated, but compared to the new design there are a few good things about it:
- High information density
- Screenshot at the top
- Link to legal review and licenses (questions that any enterprise customer would have)
- No gratuitous animation sequences
I wonder if it would have been possible to update the ReactOS site's design while retaining its informational quality. Just improving the typography and working on the padding between boxes could have made a real difference.
More generally, I wish the tide of web design trends would turn towards information density once again. Edward Tufte, a legend in the field and proponent of visual density, famously called PowerPoint presentations "chart junk" because they spend slide after slide on charts with minimal information in each.
Modern websites willingly do the same, forcing the user to scroll through a dozen screenfuls just to glean some basic information about a product. Animation makes this even worse, because the user has to sit and wait while the site slowly delivers information in animated word-sized chunks.
I actually couldn't find that in the new website. I wondered what they're targeting, and I couldn't find it.
The userland API and ABI always targets the current version of Windows, which is presently Windows NT 10.0 (Windows 10 + Server 2016)[2], and should be backwards compatible with applications designed for any previous version of NT (there's some support for DOS, 16-bit Windows, and Windows 9x too. Thanks to borrowing code from Wine, it tends to actually have a higher compatibility with applications from these eras than the current version of Windows does!)
[1] In general, Microsoft Windows x.y versions tend to be backwards compatible with drivers for all previous versions of X. For example, Server 2003 is 5.2, thus backwards compatible with 2000 and XP drivers. Windows 10 is a special case now; unless declared by an application manifest as explicitly Windows 10 aware, it lies to applications by claiming to be Windows 8.1, or NT 6.3. This way, driver installers can see that first component of the Windows version being 6 and assume compatibility; Windows 10 is still compatible with all drivers from Vista, 7, and 8.x, even though they bumped the internal version to 10.0 to match the marketing name.
[2] As of the present, this only applies to the classic Desktop APIs. Support for Metro/Modern/Universal (whatever name they pick this week...) is not planned nor in development. Given the very limited set of apps (pretty much just Google Chrome) for this API outside of the Windows Store, I don't find it likely this will change.
Disclaimer: I am not an authority of ReactOS, I've just followed the project for a long time. I need to figure out where this info has gone in the current web site design...
This is exactly what pissed me off within the first 3 seconds, that there is no way to see everything they have to say without waiting until the animation goes whole cycle and then waiting some more to make sure I didn't miss anything.
It looks like they took design tips from people optimizing for addictiveness, not usefulness. Hint: you don't need their tips if you are a FOSS project and actually lose money on people spending more time on your site than necessary.
How so? The forced smooth scrolling thing makes reading the page really annoying, and I strongly feel like closing it and never opening it again.
I was under impression that rewarding people for patiently watching your animations may be an attempt at exploiting Sunken Cost Fallacy or even just giving them some time to forget about the rest of the world.
The reason I thought that was because this site somehow reminds me of all the sites nagging me to buy something and I suppose there are reasons why those behave the way they do.
On the other hand, a home page is just that...the main page any kind of visitors will arrive, from great IT guys (as you) to no-IT guys at all. If you know about the project already it's pretty obvious the level of the info in the home page has been lowered to ease the understanding of the scope of the project. Tell a non-IT guy we're creating an operating system clone aiming NT architecture and they won't catch what is this about at all. All the tech details are waiting you in the new "Developing" section of the site then ;)
Maybe I shouldn't be too harsh, after all it was me who as a teenager hacked this panel displaying information about currently selected file in Windows 98 Explorer to slide in/out during navigation like menus in StarCraft, but c'mon - it's one thing to create such stuff and another to actually really use it. Even I couldn't bear those sliding panels for long :)
Not quite. "Chartjunk" is Tufte's term for anything in a chart that doesn't communicate information. PowerPoint presentations can be (and often are) bad in ways that have nothing to do with chartjunk, and lots of chartjunk occurs outside PowerPoint presentations.
I wonder if I'm getting old, or if attention spans are getting shorter, because the new site is quite optimised for the latter.
Similar thoughts I had for a different free software project's site redesign: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10512772
On the old website I found everything I needed to know in 0.2 seconds. Didn't even have to click on anything.
This is why 99% of programmers shouldn't be involved in design.
http://web.archive.org/web/20160207071226/http://www.reactos...
Unless a "designer" "developed" the website for them and they got blindsided, which I'm sure happens more than I care to understand. I've seen it happen at well-funded companies — employees claiming they designed something, management had no idea they didn't really do much work at all, etc.
BTW I think they did quite well. I especially like the "live activity" box at the footer that shows recent changes.
Replacing that with a commercial template doesn't seem very FOSS to me.
What they say about windows "Closed source, licensed, spy [sic]" may be true, but it doesnt tell me anything about their product. I could as well think "oh, I dont want to be spied upon, lets switch to linux".
Those sliders also did not make it obvious to me that it can run windows server 2003 applications (according to wikipedia).
And please dont override scroll behaviour.
...it also shows a juvenile level of humour that isn't appropriate for a group that wants to generate trust in an OS.
Cringe at their FAQ. I don't want my OS supplier to pretend to be hip. Super weird especially because they aren't a for-profit so it's not even a scheme to get to your money, they are just clueless a bit. Casual approach has to be earned through human contact.
https://www.reactos.org/joining/faqs
In my opinion XP was the best Windows ever. I think there are many people with legacy PCs who think the same, and who would love to have a XP alternative with real sustainability, even more due to Microsoft's attempt to lock every Win7 user into the privacy-less Win10 ecosystem.
The ReactOS team should consider to make a business of it. There are so many options. Company support, driver development, 3D, better OSX/Linux cooperation, Docker-like applications w/o desktop etc. They could provide a whole new ecosystem around Windows while retaining independency from MS.
It also didn't help that owners weren't actually users of the website and that the design was probably demoed to them on developer's machine over localhost where it may have performed reasonably fast.
There is no universal way to reliably mimic scrolling with javascript. There's too many different browsers and devices, all of them treat scrolling differently.
Aesthestics / readability aside, I worry that those animations will be painfully slow / battery draining on old slow machines with underpowered GPUs, and I would've thought that's the ReactOS target market. The folks stuck on Windows XP boxes who can't upgrade to Windows 10, and for whom a lightweight XP/2000 compatible OS that still gets security updates would be ideal.
Site is quite broken on iPad
"( a step by step and video guide can be found here)" - nevermind things like the space after the opening paranthesis, let's not be picky... but there is no link.
"Here you can find a guide about how to request a position to translate the site, and here an awesome tool created by XXXX" - again, no links, and I have some doubts whether XXXX is an actual person : ) It surely doesn't inspire much trust in a prospective user who is assumed to ask questions such as "Free and Open-whaaat...?" or "is ReactOS legal?".
https://www.reactos.org/joining/faqs
In its place, there's stupid facebook/etc social crap buttons.