Dear Freesounders,
Here we are again with our monthly community update about things that have been happening in the Freesound dev world.
This month we have not released new user-facing? features, but this does not mean we have not been working hard 🙂 We indeed made a lot of changes on things that are not so much visible, and we are also in the middle of implementing other new features that you will love but are not ready yet to be deployed. So here comes the list of things we did:
- Make links to sounds whose author changed his username still work after the username change
- Prevent some errors that could happen when users double-click submit buttons in forms
- Improvements in the way the number of sounds per users and packs, the number of posts per users, and number of comments and ratings per sounds are stored and synchronized with the real counts
- Minor improvements in moderation workflow
- Deleting your user account now requires to re-enter your password
- Fix bug that in some occasions showed wrong sound signatures
- Speed optimizations in our admin pages
- Improve the way in which we store and synchronize information about user donations
- Other minor bugfixes and optimizations
This is quite a number of things… but we have more news! Just as a kind of Christmas present, we would like to annoucne that during the last months we have been working hard with a designer on a complete redesign of the Freesound look and feel. This means that at some point in the next year Freesound will get a renewed design, more modern and easier to use. As part of the design, we slightly updated the Freesound logo and this, ladies and gentleman, will be the new logo and “red” Freesound tone:
Looks great, doesn’t it? The design phase for the new look and feel has already finished, and we have just started the actual implementation phase. During the design phase, the goal has always been to update Freesound’s look while preserving existing functionalities and workflows. It is still too early to reliably estimate a release date, but we’ll keep you posted.? Exciting, isn’t it?
Aaaand that’s it for now, thanks for reading and stay tuned for the next post!
The Freesound Team
ps: don’t see the differences in the logo? put it next to the current one 😉
Nice work and the logo looks great! 🙂
I’m just a bit sad that sometimes it takes so long to approve a sound…
Greetings, great to hear about exciting news. While you are talking about redesign of the website, I would like to remind you about the accessibility perspective. I am a totally blind user of freesound and I use the screenreader to navigate the site. Now, things works fine, but mostly after redesigning, accessiblity goes away. if you would like to consult something, feel free to contact me privately. A long long ago I tested the player which you use currently and it was a really positive experience.
Thanks for your messages Tyops and ondrosik!
Also thanks for pointing out the accessibility perspective. This is something we’ve been talking about in our internal meetings. This time we want to make sure that, after the redesign, Freesound remains good in terms of accessibility. Also there are probably some things that we could improve in terms of accessibility with respect to the current version.
We are implementing the new design in a way which will allow us to have both versions coexisting for some time. In this way we’ll be able to do some testing with you guys and make sure that we don’t miss a thing when the final release comes.
We’ll keep you updated about things related to the redesign in the coming months, and let you know when testing phases start. @ondrosik, we’ll surely contact you for testing accessibility when the time comes, thanks for your offering 🙂
Love what?s planned and I have an additional point. Frederic, you and I have been in contact regarding batch sample tagging; I would make this feature a priority for the sake of users who are inhibited from uploading to the site due to the size of their sample packs. Keep us abreast of your progress.
? Phill C.
Hi Phillip,
We are already working in it and have some beta version implemented, but we still need to iterate a bit more in testing/improvement cycles. I’d say it will probably be ready in February or so, really soon 🙂
frederic
Thx for the hard work Guys! Sounds great 🙂
This redesign sounds exciting.
(To be honest, this updated logo made me think “Nutella”.)