Darkhorse 1.3 Preview
A lot has been going on for Matygo in the past week or two (check out the new splash page, and the new blog layout), and definitely a lot more is going on this week as we are in New York for the Venture Capital in Education Summit.
With all this business focus in the past few weeks, I wanted to reassure everyone that we are still hard at work on our core technology - the Matygo learning system codenamed Darkhorse. We’ve been though two pilots of Darkhorse and have learned a lot. We’ve gotten piles of feedback from the students and instructors who have been so kind to work with us, and with Darkhorse 1.3 we have re-engineered some key components of the matygo client side tool to address these problems.
We are about 40% of the way through and hoping to have this system out some time by mid July or early August. Since this is a while away still I though it might be fun to give you a tour of some of the key changes we’ve made to the system to make it better for our users.
Performance
The number one point students seemed concerned with is performance, and we’ve heard you. The next Darkhorse is significantly faster making use of the new TemplateViews in Sproutcore 1.6 we have both way more flexibility and significantly improved performance. There aren’t any fancy screen shots for this one, but trust me on this one you are going to love it.
Fewer clicks to get started
After performance the next most common point of feedback we received is that Darkhorse 1.2 requires too many clicks to get started. Our current app loads to this pristine ‘desktop’ layer - of limited utility. Darkhorse 1.3 eschews this metaphor entirely, as it’s proven nearly pointless, and instead loads the user directly into their feed view where they receive a high level summary of the latest activity in their courses.
Darkhorse 1.2 after page load
Darkhorse 1.3 after page load
Location Location Location
A big problem with our current offering (and a lot of Sproutcore < 1.4 apps) is that the app generally has one load state and then requires the user to navigate the app into some state. With the release of SC 1.5-1.6 the tools to make urls map to application states have improved significantly. In the new app as you navigate around you will see the URL change (using hash based urls like twitter). This has the happy consequence of restoring back button functionality, but more importantly allows a user to bookmark parts of the application and load it directly into that state.
Additionally, the same system that powers this application state loading is now tied directly to the breadcrumbs view, causing them to be significantly more robust and performant. In addition to this, they have been changed to proper SC.ButtonViews which has given them a much better look and feel.
Darkhorse 1.2 base url
Darkhorse 1.3 base url
Darkhorse 1.2 breadcrumbs
Darkhorse 1.3 breadcrumbs
Face Lift!
While interface is something we’ve mostly gotten positive feedback on, we are never particularly happy to rest on our laurels and have spent a day or two with our designer Meg Robichaud to tighten up some displays that weren’t quite there yet. The result I am finding is really nice, and with the improvements made to the chance tool our browser compatibility is likely to include IE 8 and most versions of Firefox.
Darkhorse 1.2 Profile View
Darkhorse 1.3 Profile View
Darkhorse 1.2 unread / flagged counts
Darkhorse 1.3 unread / flagged counts
Credit where credit is due.
We couldn’t have done any of this without the Sproutcore team, their tireless dedication to Sproutcore is helping us bring next generation education tools to you. So tip of the hat to them.
I am really looking forward to opening up Darkhorse to the general public, which we are on track to do in late august.
Cheers,
.joe
