TextMate News

Anything vaguely related to TextMate and macOS.

New Site

Some time ago Wolfgang Bartelme of Bartelme Design sent me a template for the MacroMates site matching the style of the icon he had earlier enhanced.

Wolfgang is a very talented designer which I plan to work more with this year, though it took some time for me to actually make use of his work, since I was too busy hacking away on TextMate.

All the social gatherings of December was very disruptive on my regular rhythm, which meant I was better off working on the documentation, and that lead to redoing the site, using his template, and boy am I glad I did that!

The entire site is now in the exact same style (including the blog, wiki, and manual) and all the assorted pages are also using it, and now I get a kick out of browsing my own site :)

In this process, I also enhanced the purchase procedure in a rather neat way. If you click “Buy Online” from within TextMate, you are sent to the normal purchase page, but TextMate adds an argument (in addition to your name + email used as default values for the form) which instructs the last page of the purchase procedure to redirect back to TextMate via the custom txmt URL scheme, giving the owner name and newly bought license key as payload.

The result of this is that you will not have to manually copy and paste the license key which is sent by email. The email is still sent and can be used as a fallback.

A feature that roughly half my new users will experience once, but damn was it worth the time to implement!

Regarding this site, now that it is even less obvious what software I run, here is the list:

I should add that this site does not look correct in IE, it actually looks like crap. The original template did work, but I changed it to have a somewhat fluid layout, and apparently IE is not as up-to-date with CSS as the browsers we have available on Mac. All the more reason to switch!

categories General

8 Comments

05 January 2006

by Alderete

I love the new site look, though I think perhaps the non-active text for the tab links is too dark, and nearly disappears into the very dark background.

Regarding the site not looking good in IE, I suppose that given that TextMate is Mac OS X only, it would be easy to just write it off, knowing that most prospects and customers will be using Safari or Firefox or Camino.

But, in case you’d like to try to fix it (you know, to keep up the steady stream of requests from Windows users who really want TextMate, but not a Mac :-), you might look at the following clever JavaScript “patch” that makes Internet Explorer (on Windows) work more like the usual standards-compliant browsers:

/IE7/ – http://dean.edwards.name/IE7/intro/

It would be a quick, non-invasive fix for the issue; seems like it would be worth trying out, anyway.

05 January 2006

by Jo

Great work! The site looks really nice and navigation is really easy. Bravo!

05 January 2006

by ceejayoz

Looks beautiful!

05 January 2006

by Sebastian Gräßl

Austrians eock the Web!

05 January 2006

by Sebastian Gräßl

oops… i meant “Austrian rock the Web”

05 January 2006

by minimal design

It’s looks way better than before but the navbar is a little too dark, the sidebar is huge w/ huge icons… Is this 37signals influence? Hope not ;) I think the whole thing looks too much like a blog, which is not a real problem besides for the front page which doesn’t communicate how professional TextMate really is in my opinion…

At least one thing should be changed: the drop shadow img should be a background of the body instead of what must be the main div ‘cause on pages like the wiki and contact, it doesn’t go down all the way at the bottom of the browser’s window because there isn’t enough content to push the div all the way down… That’s on a 20’ cinama display which really common among OS X users…

Just my $0.2

As I said, still waaaaay better than before :)

05 January 2006

by Thomas Aylott

Looks slick. Excellent design.

IE can go take a flying leap ;)

06 January 2006

by Tim Dorr

Call me a cynic, but I don’t like the new design. Yes, it’s more flashy and pretty, but I don’t think it’s going to do much for your sales.

You have a big problem with the front page, mainly. Look at the first paragraph of text. The way it snakes around those images makes it hard to read and confusing visually. You then list features as just a bullet list with links to the manual. That’s a really half-assed feature list, to me. That should be broken up into separate pages, each with a small paragraph describing them from the sales perspective, not the user perspective. If people are reading through that, they haven’t even used TextMate at that point, so they don’t want to see things that isn’t targetting them.

I also understand the unified design concept, but does that righthand bar need to be on every page? Take the manual page for example. If you’re reading the product documentation, why would you ever need a link to try or buy the software? Why would you need a link to the documentation when you’re already there? The header and footer of the site is fine, but you really shouldn’t have that all over the place.

I really like this product. It converted me from BBEdit, which is no small feat. I just don’t like seeing this website associated with it. It’s all flash and no substance.