

Khan Academy Redesign - woan
http://shipordie.com/post/4662729644/mobile-social-local-pivot-well-one-of-those

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duopixel
While the new design is better visually, it follows a trend that I've seen the
past few years and that I don't particularly like: it dedicates almost all of
the real estate trying to convince you that the Khan Academy is great, while
downplaying the videos which are the actual content of the site.

This is fine for an app or content that is behind a "registerwall", because
you must convince the user that registering is worthwhile. But in the Khan
Academy the courses a freely available. Instead of presenting me a video of
Sal chatting with Bill G on the stage of TED, I'd prefer a video that is
likely to expand my understanding of the universe.

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jasonrr
Totally fair criticism. Like any design effort, it represents a careful
priority balancing act. The Khan Academy is trying to do a lot of things, and
communicating that effectively is a challenge. For example, not everyone is as
knowledgeable as you are about what the Khan Academy offers and why they
should care. The good news is that people don't have any trouble finding the
videos, so I don't think the design is causing too much damage from the
perspective of getting to the content you want.

That said, the sketches/mockups that led us to the current iteration of the
design also included both the idea of featured content in the main video
carousel and different homepage content for users who are signed in. They
didn't make the cut yet, but we haven't forgotten about them.

Ultimately, I agree that we want to make it as efficient as possible to get to
the content you want quickly, and I don't think we're there yet.

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neovive
Great job on the redesign. I've been following Khan Academy for a long time
and the new design is great leap in usability and the playlist feature is
excellent. The old site required a lot of in-browser searching and definitely
was not as appealing to younger audiences.

BTW: Sal's TED talk was very inspiring and really demonstrated the amazing
potential of his work. It's great to see all of the recognition and support he
is receiving and the excellent team now in place. His talk even inspired me to
start blogging about Education last month -- see the first post on
Education2.org [<http://www.education2.org/2011/03/welcome-to-
education2-org>].

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barmstrong
JQuery mobile seems like an awesome way to get both iPhone and Android support
in one fell swoop.

It's still not quite as good as a native app, but it seems like you're getting
90% of the benefit with about 10% of the work. For a dev team strapped for
resources it seems like a good option.

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te_chris
Best thing is, combine it with PhoneGap and you've got a "native" app store
submittable app quickly.

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zitterbewegung
I have heard the performance of using PhoneGap versus a native android app is
quite noticeable. YMMV

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6ren
I wonder how much faster phones need to be for it not to matter (i.e. native
is still faster, but not noticeably). Would dual core be enough? Assuming the
engines can scale behind the scenes for us, how many cores would be needed?

This would change everything, especially for the iPhone's walled gargen
(unless new apps appear that require the extra power - perhaps console-quality
games? complex visualizations)

Intel managed an amazing trick, of keeping demand for more processing power
strong for decades (from 1978 to 1998; when the celeron was introduced, for
the market that valued low price over performance; and 2008, the Atom for low
power consumption over performance). But to really compete against ARM
requires letting go of the blessing and the curse of back-compatibility -
which Intel hasn't succeeded at so far (see Itanium). The demand for
performance seems to be ending, and I expect with it, Intel will also -
perhaps by 2018.

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ryanpetrich
iOS's JavaScript engine and version of WebKit is single-threaded; dual core
won't help (this isn't strictly true, but there's a global lock that they both
acquire). No support for WebWorkers either

Perhaps Android is better in this regard?

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Raphael
I would strongly recommend a black background to go with the blackboard theme
of the videos. (Alternatively, switch to whiteboard visuals). It would blend
so nicely. Also, the blackboard animation should be in a smooth vector format
instead of blurry compressed, bandwidth-intensive videos. Now for words and
symbols, I recommend text. You can easily time-release it with JavaScript. For
diagrams, maybe something like Graffiti Markup Language.
<http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/about/>

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rubergly
The design looks very slick, and I'm very impressed.

My one complaint is that it seems wrong to have a pseudo-hover state for the
entries in the lists. I don't know what standard practice is in mobile web
interfaces, but it seems strange that scrolling causes elements to look
selected because you have to hit a point in order to start scrolling.

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marcomonteiro
I noticed that too and wondered if it was by design or a bug in the
implementation. I haven looked at the source though so can't answer
knowledgeably.

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ryanpetrich
It's a side effect of the way iOS implements scrolling--as soon as scrolling
starts the web content is "frozen" and only resumes once the scroll is
complete. Only way around is to imitate the native scroll using CSS and
JavaScript.

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rubergly
But why is the item selected in the first place? It's not like it's doing the
same animation as when the item is actually clicked (at which point it turns
blue).

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tybris
You can never have enough pictures of Bill Gates.

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roryokane
Clickable link: <http://www.khanacademy.org/>

I had expected that the image of the redesign would link to the main page, but
annoyingly, it does not, nor is there a link anywhere else in the article.

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jasonrr
Good point! Fixed it in the main article too. Thanks.

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krosaen
fwiw the khan academy runs on app engine and is open source:

[https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-
develop...](https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-
developers/getting-started-with-the-code)

pretty easy to keep up with the progress by running it locally and
occasionally syncing.

one note: on my nexus one, the back button in the upper left of the mobile
site doesn't work. specifically, after clicking on one of the list items,
sliding to the right, I can't go back by hitting the button on the upper left.

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albahk
Logo looks very similar to the Banyan Tree Logo. Banyan Tree is a very famous
luxury brand in Asia.

www.banyantree.com

