Design

[Dom Wood]

So, what sort of style are we going for? I think reflecting the ethic
of Fancy would be a good idea,
rather than just slinging a random design together.

[Nils Haldenwang]

I am not very creative concerning design, would like
to see some prototype or something, to imagine
what "reflecting the ethic of Fancy" could mean.

Sorry, I am programmer only ^^

I am really looking forward to see something.

Regards,
Nils

2010/9/22 Dom Wood <domini...@gmail.com>:

[Christopher Bertels]

Hi!

Excerpts from Dom Wood's message of Mi Sep 22 19:07:53 +0200 2010:

> So, what sort of style are we going for? I think reflecting the ethic
> of Fancy would be a good idea,
> rather than just slinging a random design together.

Yeah. Well I think it should be a clean, readable and modern design.
Some websites of other programming languages I like are:

http://rubini.us/
http://www.ruby-lang.org/de/
http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/
http://jruby.org/
http://ooc-lang.org/

I especially like http://ooc-lang.org/. I think it's just very clean
and well-arranged.

Would be nice if you would come up with an initial draft and post it
here or something, so we have something to discuss further.

Cheers,
Christopher.

PS: Oh and thanks for wanting to help! It's very much appreciated. :)
--
================================
Christopher Bertels
http://www.fancy-lang.org
http://www.adztec-independent.de
GPG Key ID: 0x2345b203

[dominic wood]

What is the aim of Fancy as a language? What's it based on? Stuff like that will help me work out a concept :)

Regards,

Dom.

[Christopher Bertels]

Excerpts from dominic wood's message of Mi Sep 22 19:59:46 +0200 2010:

> What is the aim of Fancy as a language? What's it based on? Stuff like that
> will help me work out a concept :)

Oh sure. OK, here's a short summary:

Fancy is a dynamic, pure object-oriented programming language inspired by Smalltalk, Ruby and Erlang.
The syntax is a mix of those three languages but should be most familiar to Smalltalk and Ruby programmers.

Fancy
- is a file-based language like Ruby
- embraces Unix based systems and Unix philosophy
- can be used for scripting
- should be fun & easy to learn
- is easy to extend
- has a (hopefully) easy to understand implementation that can be
changed over time
- has a simply conceptual model of objecs sending messages (like
Smalltalk)
- uses ducktyping
- has mixins
- has classes
- has closures (blocks)
- allows metaprogramming (changing code/classes/methods/class
hierarchies during runtime)
- is interpreted (interpreter written in C++)
- is compiled & runs (soon) on the Rubinius VM (see http://rubini.us/)
- has (actually will have) actors & futures built-in to the language
as concurrency mechanics (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model)
- lots of more.

You might also want to check out the wiki @ http://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/wiki
and the example programms @ http://github.com/bakkdoor/fancy/tree/master/examples/
to get a feeling for the language

I hope this somewhat answers your questions? :)

Christopher.

[dominic wood]

Cool, so we're after clean, usable and robust looks. One last thing, any colour preferences?

Dom.

[Christopher Bertels]

Excerpts from dominic wood's message of Do Sep 23 04:11:43 +0200 2010:

> Cool, so we're after clean, usable and robust looks. One last thing, any
> colour preferences?

I personally like blue, red and white. But just take that as an
inspiration. If you come up with a better color scheme (that actually
looks good) go with it :)

[dominic wood]

Ok, mind giving me a couple of days to get a rough design done? I'm sort of on holiday until Sunday,  but I can have some ideas down by Monday if that's OK with you?

[Nils Haldenwang]

> Ok, mind giving me a couple of days to get a rough design done? I'm sort of
> on holiday until Sunday,  but I can have some ideas down by Monday if that's
> OK with you?

Of course it's okay, there is no schedule at all. :-)

Have a nice weekend!

Looking forward to see it.

[dominic wood]

Great and same to you :)

[dominic wood]

Hey,

So I had an idea for this last night and I'm knocking up a quick layout for ya. I'll send you a screenshot in an hour or two to see if you like or not :)

Dom

[Christopher Bertels]

Cool, excited to see what you got so far :)

[dominic wood]

I went with a palette from ColourLovers and modified it a bit. I've gone for a selection of ice cream like shades. I'm quite liking it, but whether it fits your brief is another question lol.

[dominic wood]

Right, here's what I've knocked up in an hour or two!

Is this sort of thing ok? It's mainly the style and colour scheme I'm worried about.

Linky: http://pixelthump.net/Fancy/Fancy1.bmp

[dominic wood]

P.S. I know it's not exactly what you asked for, but programming languages always have such  boring websites :P

[Christopher Bertels]

On 27 Sep., 13:46, dominic wood <dominicwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Right, here's what I've knocked up in an hour or two!
>
> Is this sort of thing ok? It's mainly the style and colour scheme I'm
> worried about.
>
> Linky:http://pixelthump.net/Fancy/Fancy1.bmp

I like the general Idea & layout. The only thing I'm not very fond of
is the color scheme. Maybe less brown? Don't know. Maybe you could try
it with different colors?
I do like to top (logo / slogan + menu bar).
Does anyone else have opinions?

[dominic wood]

The colour scheme is what I was concerned about, I'll try it in a few different colours :)

[dominic wood]

Here's a quick blue one: http://pixelthump.net/Fancy/Fancyblue.bmp

[Christopher Bertels]

Hmm. Well I think the very light blue makes it hard to read the text.
I guess I liked the brown version more. Maybe a darker blue color? Or
something else? Don't know :)
For example, I like the blue with white color scheme on ooc's website:
http://ooc-lang.org/

Another small thing: Right now the design only contains text. Would be
nice to have some small images in there as well (but I suppose there
aren't any since this is an early draft anyway).

On 27 Sep., 14:50, dominic wood <dominicwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a quick blue one:http://pixelthump.net/Fancy/Fancyblue.bmp
>

> On 27 September 2010 13:34, dominic wood <dominicwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > The colour scheme is what I was concerned about, I'll try it in a few
> > different colours :)
>

[dominic wood]

I've been naughty and stolen their colours to see how it looks, I'm liking the change myself.

http://pixelthump.net/Fancy/fancyblue2.bmp

[dominic wood]

I'm trying to get the basic style and colours out of the way before I start with the content etcetera. The actual design is very simple and I plan on adding three quarters of a ton of sex appeal one we get the basics down :)

[Christopher Bertels]

On 27 Sep., 15:10, dominic wood <dominicwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been naughty and stolen their colours to see how it looks, I'm liking
> the change myself.http://pixelthump.net/Fancy/fancyblue2.bmp

Ok, I think that's better already. But it's still missing a little
extra color. It feels very cold somehow, whereas the ooc website feels
a lot warmer (I suppose due to the additional colors and images).
Also, maybe you can play a little with the "box-background" colors.
And maybe the text could use a different color than the background
(e.g. not having everything in blue).

[dominic wood]

Yeah, I'm already changing a lot of stuff :) I'll come back in a few hours with something a lot more developed.

[Christopher Bertels]

On 27 Sep., 15:35, dominic wood <dominicwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, I'm already changing a lot of stuff :) I'll come back in a few hours
> with something a lot more developed.

Cool! Thanks for the work already ;)

[Jose Narvaez]

The site distribution seems fine to me! :)

But the color scheme, just as Christopher says, IMHO has a lot of brown.

I like the logo!

Nice work!

[dominic wood]

Thanks :) We are now going for a blue design, I'm working on the content as it's a bit flat and boring lol. 

[Jose Narvaez]

I like the last one!, in the "How about this" section will be convenient a white color, with some syntax highlights for the code.

Again! Nice work!

[Nils Haldenwang]

I like the light blue design as well, would agree with what bakkdoor
said about the first two drafts. But the last one looks very nice, go
on with that!

Good job!

[Victor Hugo Borja]

Personally, I like the fonts and the overall distribution, but IMHO the site would be a lot more attractive if more spacing is used (a trend in web2.0 styles) see for example the rubini.us site, scrolling down is fine on this web2.0 era.

I also tend to like cheerful colors.. some kind of light blue, something like .. 

 http://www.colourlovers.com/palette/92095/Giant_Goldfish

 just my 2 cents.. Of course it's up to the fancy community to decide what looks better,

Cheers, and thanks for helping fancy in diverse ways.
--
vic

Quaerendo invenietis.

[dominic wood]

Yeah, I'm working with a blue colour sheme now, and the content was purely to have something to actually put the colours on. 

I'm working away at this, naturally other stuff does take priority nut I'm paying a lot of attention to this :)

[Christopher Bertels]

Hey Dominic,

just wondering if you had time to work on the design some more :)
We're currently working towards a new release (hopefully coming out
soon) with lots of new features, including a working bytecode compiler
for the Rubinius VM.
It would be really sweet to have a new website when we're going to
release the next version of Fancy to the public. If you haven't had
time to work on it so far, that's fine.
Just let us know so we can plan out things a little better =)

Cheers,
Christopher.

[dominic wood]

Hi Chris, 

Sorry I went a bit quiet on this, been caught up in a whole slew of things. 

I have been working on this as much as possible, and I'm free today so I can get much more done!

What's the rough release date for the next version? I'll do my best to get something done by then :)

Dom.

[Christopher Bertels]

Excerpts from dominic wood's message of Di Okt 12 15:44:29 +0200 2010:

> Hi Chris,
>
> Sorry I went a bit quiet on this, been caught up in a whole slew of things.
> I have been working on this as much as possible, and I'm free today so I can
> get much more done!

Cool & no worries about not having time for this :)

> What's the rough release date for the next version? I'll do my best to get
> something done by then :)

There's no offical date yet, but I'd say end of october latest
(hopefully). At least by then I'd like to release a new version
(0.3.0) that has all the latest changes (regarding the port to the
Rubinius VM) incorporated.

Cheers,
Christopher.

[Victor Hugo Borja]

Here's a link to the "smalltalk on jvm" project http://redline.st/  I like the web design, minimalist, and beautiful.

Hope it can also serve for inspiration.

Cheers
--
vic

Quaerendo invenietis.

[Christopher Bertels]

Hey Dom,

Just been wondering, if you're still working on this or don't have
time / interest anymore?
If not, I'd like to repost this on forrst.com and possibly other
websites since we're very keen on having a new and fresh webdesign for
Fancy's website.

Cheers,
Christopher.