New features for June
Felt like working on Adventure again, especially that my friend @gravislizard actually contributed a feature:
- @gravislizard wrote the new search feature. Google CSE was really janky. This is pretty damn quick, displays only relevant results, and provides some richer filtering for year, vendor, tags, and platform. Check it out!
- He also did a minor visual refresh of the product/release page.
- There's now a screenshot gallery for easier viewing of a lot of product pages than just the carousel.
- OpenGraph is supported for fancy link previews.
- Minor bug fixes for stability.
Comments
Rather disappointing default listing. After selecting e.g. the "Application" heading from the front screen and then selecting e.g. "DOS" from any entry, this used to produce a nice alphabetical listing of DOS Applications. Now it produces a seemingly random list with no obvious means of ordering it in any sensible fashion.
Looking into it; this wasn't intended behavior.
Fix for that merged and deployed.
Partial fix. First page displays OK. But go down to bottom and select page 2 (or any page) and the "Platform" selection is lost. Re-select the chosen platform and it takes you back to the first page of your selected listing but go down to the bottom and select page 2 (or any page) and ......
Just about time WinWorld/Adventure starts moving forward in terms of development.
I quite like some of the new features, such as the "Available releases" bar in the product pages. I also like the new search results page, because I agree, Google CSE was a bit defective sometimes.
The only problem is the text for the download listings, because when I have the "Classicish WinWorld" theme enabled, the wording for the downloads is dark so I can't see it well. But maybe that will be fixed eventually.
Bugs acknowledged, we have a ton of updates slated to go out soon to fix them and add missing features.
Thanks for the feedback @JonathonWyble! With regards the style issue, it's hard to work with overlaid user styles but we've been talking themes a lot in the last few days, so ideally we'll be able to remove the need for you to run one at all and fix that in one go. No ETA on that notion though.
Sorry if the bug reports seemed a little negative. The improved search function is a great idea and once the thing is working properly it will be a real benefit. I agree with @JonathonWyble about liking the "Available releases" bar.
No problem! Hopefully something can be done about the dark wording in the download listings on product pages, because I like having the dark theme enabled. I get that theme from this thread, BTW.
About a year ago, I did construct a project/suggestion for the WinWorld layout to make the site look similar to what it used to look like. I don't think that would ever actually happen, though.
No prob, it's the nature of the beast. Frankly I feel we jumped the gun more than a little. Next release should be soon and will feel a lot more polished IMO.
Fixed up search a lot. We also added icons that display, and default to whatever's appropriate for the tag/category.
Known bugs: changing a product's icon doesn't work for site admins yet. On it.
One of the new features is sorting. The default sort should be sensible (alpha a-z) but the other options should be very helpful.
The search form also doesn't show up when you link to search from somewhere else anymore; just click the Advanced Search button to summon it
All ears for any issues or glaringly missing sort options, and of course anything not working or distasteful about all the new icon functionality on the search results and product detail pages.
I think site admin icon management should work now.
I think icon uploading and presets should work for site admins now.
These new features and improvements are really good. And I think this is the future of WinWorld and Adventure!
Since we are messing with this stuff, can we have a download file type of "8 inch floppy"?
Also, can we have a download Processor architecture for "8080/Z80"?
cal can confirm but that should be easy. Will open an issue to track since we need art before we can deploy new types.
@SomeGuy This is slightly out of my bailiwick: Z80 and 8080 should not be separate archs in your eyes?
I'm adding the additional architectures and media types now. They might not have images for them yet though.
FWIW, additional architectures:
Plus the additional file types:
Well, with 8080/z80 stuff, you have a lot of CP/M software that was sold for and run on z80, but contains only 8080 code, to keep itself portable. There is no easy way to tell the difference between an 8080 or Z80 binary unless you try to run it on a target platform or disassemble the code.
From a software perspective, Z80 is a superset of the 8080, in the same way an NEC V20 is a superset of an 8088.
Similarly, we have lots of 16-bit executable DOS programs that technically require a NEC V20, 186, 286 or 386 CPU but are still marked "x86". We don't differentiate between those.
Got it, thanks! Can you name anything offhand that's uploaded right now for that platform, or is there anything?
Oh, for what it's worth, Calvin tells me that the x86-32 arch is meant to mean "32-bit" whereas the x86 arch means "16-bit" - so the "needs a 386" distinction was in place but I think was not very clear (he had to explain it to me, I was baffled) so I think we have a lot of software that's technically mislabeled.
FWIW, some of the crashes in production was because we were exhausted a prepared statement cache with ephemeral queries. I fixed that so those won't be cached anymore.
Just tested out the search feature under the library... works like a charm
But what about the long-awaited "new releases" thing that was brought up several times? I'd still like to know what new releases are added without having to skim through pages of the library as I've done many times. I hope that can be considered sometime soon.
That's in the hopper as we speak! After Search (which I consider more or less done at this point,) discoverability is a big focus of our current efforts and I figure this is job one. It's a little complicated due to some changes in the site structure but it's a priority for me.
@Bry89 the RSS feed seems to work pretty well for that until they get something going on the webpage.
From a practical standpoint I label Windows 95/NT 32-bit binaries, Windows 3.1+Win32s binaries, and OS/2 2.x native binaries as x86-32.
MS-DOS applications, and Windows 3.1 16-bit executable format application are "x86". These applications may contain machine code that actually makes it require some specific CPU such as a 386, but that does NOT make it "32-bit". DOS extenders are a bit of a grey area as they are still not pure 32-bit.
The majority of CP/M programs will be 8080/Z80, for example: https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-basic/80
I feel like maybe these architectures would be better labeled i386 and 8086, then it would mean what we want instead of requiring interpretation, and would be more meaningful to users.
Then we get into stuff that requires a 286 (OS/2 1.x) - then not to mention what happens for other architectures (i.e POWER vs PPC, to speak nothing of ROMP, plus things that required a 603 or G3 on top)...
The x86 vs. x86-32 distinction is mostly because 32-bit x86 was a big leap in terms of platform characteristics and how most x86 world software got bifurcated into "this requires a 32-bit processor" or not.
I see the product pages now have little icons in the download listings. That was a nice touch! Maybe you could have kept the file type section in the lists, and placed the icon under where it says "File Type".