Phonon, the amazing multimedia abstraction layer for KDE and Qt software is growing younger by the day. How cool is that? Ladies and gentleman, I give you the all new phonon.kde.org:
The new design was created by Tomasz Dudzik and made into code by Wojciech Ryrych. I would like to take the opportunity and thank both for their amazing work. Great job, guys! Also thanks to Ben Cooksley for helping with the transition on the sysadmin side of things 🙂
This stunning new site is not only gorgeous, but also highly efficient. Instead of having information for each target audience (user, developer, community) on the same site, rotting away for lack of maintenance, we are making once more use of the great KDE infrastructure. Everything is nicely “outsourced” to the respective KDE wikis where everyone can contribute to the knowledge and make the reading experiences all the better.
Over the next couple of days we will still tweak the site a bit, like a quick introduction to the awesomeness called Phonon is still missing.
I hope you like the site as much as I do.
Awesome Bonus
You like Phonon enough to want it on your wallpaper? No problem! Tomasz also took care of that (size is 2 MiB):
💺 Blog 
The website looks nice.
A link to the api-docs and a comparison between Phonon and QtMultimedia would probably a good idea.
The link to techbase shows to the main page of techbase, i am not sure, if it was your intention.
Yay! Looking good!
And linking to the KDE wikis looks like a very sensible choice to me.
Rock on! 🙂
Great design 😛
Just a few notes on implementation – Its kind a web convention to have headers (the icon + User base and other two) clickable as links,
Naming links as “more»” or similar artificial words is band for SEO, since google and other boots uses them to rank sites they link to. And giving mode credibility to *kde.org is valuable thing.
For the techbase, it would be great to have some directs links to manuals and how to. Browsing wikis is not the easiest ways, especially for fresher devs.
Keep on going 🙂
Hey. Thanks for your hint! I’ll change the page and send it to Harold as soon as possible.
Should you have any further hints on how to improve the site, feel free to drop in an e-mail at rrh at op pl.
As an aside, yesterday I improved typography in images (made by Tomek) in the carousel. 🙂
Done as you told. Unfortunatelly I don’t have much knowledge on SEO and for last couple of months I’ve been focused purely on JavaScript/jQuery so I have to catch up on my HTML/CSS.
I am open to your all ideas and they are welcomed!
Wow, It was a damn quick 🙂
cool, i really like the new design 😀
also it seems that now i got a new wallpaper 😛
Beautiful! If you want, you can also add there “dots” for switching within slide show images (I do not know how to describe them, but you can see them for example on http://www.ubuntu.com/ below “Explore features>”), it helps very much if you want to go through slide show…
Dots were previously present but I decided to scrap them because there’re only 3 images.
OK, good point. Please, add them back when there are more than three images – it would take too long to wait to read the rest of the sentence if you wouldn’t catch it.
Hey. I decided to add these dots. Hope you’ll like it!
The page title is currently “Phonon Website” which is a bit of a tautology. How about “Phonon, the Qt Multimedia Solution”?
done 🙂
I have one more suggestion. Considering that this website is designed as a common entry point for users and developers of phonon, it might be a good idea to add a small introduction about what phonon is and what it means to users and developers of kde. Something like,
“Phonon, one of the ‘pillars of kde’, is responsible for handling multimedia playback for kde applications. It can also be used independently with any qt application.
For developers, it provides a common API for handling audio/video playback(/recording?) in their applications. This makes it simpler to write multimedia applications without worrying about the platform. Currently supported backends include gstreamer (linux), vlc (linux, windows), xine (linux), mplayer (linux, windows), quicktime (os x) and directshow (windows).
For the users, it represents the end to all sound-related issues. Simply install a backend, set it as the preferred backend for phonon and enjoy the show!”
Disclaimer: The above is just a rough draft and it probably has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate. 🙂
“Over the next couple of days we will still tweak the site a bit, like a quick introduction to the awesomeness called Phonon is still missing.”
With JS off it looks empty…
For instance…
Let’s say that you’re a developer who’d like to create a multimedia player of your own. Then you’ll have to figure out how to read/play all sorts of codecs (hundreds and hundreds of ’em, Xvid, Divx, AAC, MP3, Theora, WMV,…..), etc and implement all that to your video player, despite of the GUI creation using GTK or Qt or any other that you like (you know creating a graphical “player” with buttons and stuff).
So, it’s pretty boring and hard work (who likes that :P). But with a multimedia framework, since they’ve done all the hard work for you (such as building programming codes for playing all those different codecs, etc), all you have to do is built a GUI and simply “attach” the multimedia framework to the “player”. So, whenever a user requests a file to play via your GUI, all your GUI does is just calls for the framework libraries and give the job to them. Tratamientos Celulitis