We’ve just made our second major update to Nokia Developer Projects this year, delivering improved usability and stability, along with better tools for finding out about, and communicating with, other users.
The most significant and obvious change is the user profile box which appears when you hover the mouse over a user ID.
User profile box
The profile box provides quick access to view users’ public profiles, and tickets. More importantly it makes it easy to send private messages to other users via the Nokia Developer messaging service. While the discussion boards are great for most questions, this will help in those cases where a one-to-one conversation is more appropriate.
Other changes include better formatted code boxes in wiki, new layout in My Projects view, unified style on projects’ summary pages and auto-complete feature in ticket fields.
Autocomplete for user selection
We’ve also make a large number of less visible improvements “under the hood” (over one hundred internal tickets were resolved). For example, the Trac software version was updated to version 0.12.3 and we implemented a number of stability fixes. For a more detailed view on the main changes that were made, please see the milestone report here.
Lastly, Nokia Developer Projects is all about sharing, so we decided to open source the whole of the Projects infrastructure. You can download a complete version of the software from here (omitting only the Nokia specific UI theme).
Improvements will not end here; during the last quarter we assigned few talented user experience specialists to evaluate our service, and not surprisingly there are many places where we can improve in terms of usability. We have only just started to implement the changes based on the evaluation and you can expect to see the first improvements in the very near future!
On behalf of the Projects service team, we hope you really enjoy what we’ve delivered!
- Tomi Paananen & Hamish Willee
