I am no one to talk. My design is not very good. I do kind of square things… I do some snappy design from time to time, but I am not a web 2.0 maestro. Yet it surprises me how much the Apple Developer Connection sucks…
I was recently looking for the second part of using Ruby On Rails for Leopard. The article was mentioned originally in YCombinator! but looking for it again a second time required that I login to the ADC member page. And that’s when I realized how ugly this website is.
Looking for the article in mention? I have no idea how to go back. If you accidentally hit the back button, you log out. Unless your browser saves in cache your login information, you have to type it all over again.
And what happened to the menu design? The home page has links poorly disguised as icons (and no, I am not so intuitive…) The ADC product icon takes you to another page where a paid connection is about a year’s salary here in Panama (and I am not sure if it gets any cheaper living in the USA). The download section has neat links organized on the side. It lacks any Ruby or Rails entry… It took me ages looking for the before mentioned article under some obscure link for Script Languages. Most of the free downloads are PDF books on Apple topics, which are basically twenty five pages explaining what a computer is, or what Java does, and then condensing all important API’s into five pages while one wonders where to go next (Google most of the time…)
I sometimes think that Apple does it on purpose to get paid subscriptions. Since I have no motivation for paying, I don’t know for sure. But it would occur to me that Apple would care about developers and design a very decent website. Maybe it’s because they developed the whole thing using WebObjects and JSF technology (okay, not JSF but at least JSP and servlets…) instead of a more friendly approach? I mean, all you do is download PDF files and some .dmg files, no need for big old Java, especially in the slow way these pages get updates… It seems to me they look the same since 2001.
Do we need good design for developers? I think my life would be easier if looking for part 2 of the Rails Using Leopard article was only a click away. I already bought a MacBook, but I might consider buying a new one even more if Apple cultivates me as a consumer. And please, not with glitter marketing (I majored in marketing…) but with cool products and even cooler service and support.
For example, there is no search box… and this is Apple’s website for developers! Even Sun has a half decent website where I learned the little I know of Java. For crying out loud, most of the cool pages I know for coding run on blog engines which are open sourced, and any of them look better than Apple’s Website.
So if anyone from Apple is listening, I will be more than happy to work on an ass-kicking, mind blowing, marketing fulled, eye catching, user friendly, and environmentally sound website for developers to get their goodies. I charge Panama rates, which are dirt cheap considering how much money you guys at Apple make. After all, the company that made DESIGN the fad word of the moment should have a compatible website…
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