Thursday, April 30, 2009

Version 2.0. Early beta.

Version 2.0 of gotAPI website is in last stages of development. Our goal was to update all the indexes, make search faster and more straight-forward. We took some risky steps and eliminated elements of user interface; we moved things around. Let us know what you think about our new approach - we are eager to get your opinion. If there was time to affect how gotAPI is going to work, it is now. Early beta of version 2.0 service is available at http://beta.gotapi.com.

25 comments:

Lars said...

Actually I think, it's a big step back. I never used gotapi for textsearch, but to browse the api to get some inspiration.

this is gone now... :-(

DJ K-Sea said...

yeah, same here. While I use search from time to time, I normally grab functions from the left nav.

Also coldfusion 7 and 8 searchs are not returning data.

Mythril said...

Lars & K-Sea: What, seriously? I never use the navigation bar for anything, and use search exclusively! Keyboard control is far superior to mouse control IMHO.

I think the beta is great, and I love that there's no longer any need to select another API to find the function I want to look up! For example if I code PHP and MySQL, I can look up both PHP and MySQL functions in the same search. And it's really quite quick too. :)

BM said...

I seriously prefere the existing interface...

If I am looking for something generally it's specific, the dropdown selection is much slower to do that the present method i.e. it's an extra click or so away.

Anonymous said...

I love the new version, it's especially helpful that the on-page anchors now work (for Rails). The combination of HTML/CSS/JS is also good.

Popovich said...

I don´t like the new version.
The great utility of gotapi was the left bar where i can easily find tutorials, code examples etc.

The searching is usefull when you kwow what you are looking for.
But if you just want to digg around without a specific objective is very very bad.

I hope you keep the old site features.

Popovich said...

... And also where is .NET api???

Mythril said...

O presidente: Ah, of course! I can use the search bar because usually I remember the function name, but I don't remember the parameter order.

But if you don't even know the function name, then I'll agree that just having search isn't quite sufficient...

Ah well, my bad. I like the beta version because it fits my needs, but I guess it'd be useful to have the option to browse the APIs manually too.

Unknown said...

I love the updates, I loved it so much that I built a textmate command for the new got-api site:

http://bit.ly/WKgJsThanks for building such a useful resource, keep up the good work!

Anonymous said...

Mixed language search is great, but the left nav is very helpfull (please keep it).

========
Another comment:
Activestate Perl in gotapi.com needs a find and replace actualization. Example:

http://docs.activestate.com/activeperl/5.6/lib/Pod/perlfunc.html#item_chomp

now is

http://docs.activestate.com/activeperl/5.10/lib/pods/perlfunc.html#chomp

please do a
sed -e 's?5\.6/lib/Pod?5.10/lib/pods?g'
into activeperl api

Mike said...

I really loved the left nav, with search right above it. The current search is confusing and my eyes get lost easy.

Anonymous said...

Still don't like it... please don't roll this version out... I will never use it!

Brainsick said...

alert("here"); That's quite an innovative idea. : P

Seriously though, the beta interface is annoying me. I like start.gotapi and standard gotapi much better.

The ONLY way the left navigation bar list thing works is after loading an API, otherwise clicking on the API list on the left does nothing.

Hit refresh and none of the Adobe API stuff would load.

Firefox 3.0.14, Vista, ...

mathew said...

Choosing "HTML/CSS/JavaScript" doesn't actually seem to include CSS or JavaScript; the left navigator only ever shows HTML.

The "Choose..." tab to restrict to a chosen set of sources doesn't seem to work either. Even if I select only Java 1.6, it still shows JavaScript matches above the horizontal rule as well as the Java matches.

Finally, the text is a bit eyestrainy. You seem to be using absolute text sizes rather than relative.

Anonymous said...

This is pretty bad. The old version hasn't had a functional way to view anything on Mozilla's JS reference for, what, a year? You could have just bugfixed that and called it a day.

The typeahead is cool but only if I can set a preference to filter which APIs are included in the result set. Like nearly every one of your users, I absolutely do not care about 90% of the APIs indexed on the site (and everyone's 10% is different). Furthermore you should have just enhanced the existing experience with a nice typeahead, not centered the whole site around it. Typeaheads are only useful when you know exactly what you're looking for; the organizational drill-down you get from a left nav bar is critical for programmers looking for something for which they don't know the name.

But most importantly: in the current and the beta versions, it's impossible to look at anything having to do with JS (talking about Mozilla, not w3s, which is mostly worthless) which is why I started using gotAPI in the first place. Fix it!

Unknown said...

I love that Flex 3 docs are included, but I don't like the new interface. I'll occasionally use search, but sometimes I'm need to just browse what classes/methods are available, and that's not working (none of the packages are expanding).

Redesigns are great, but I don't think you should remove functionality that a lot of people have gotten used to using.

I also don't like that clicking in the search bar covers the content area. I liked how in the old UI it was a "popup" window that only partially obscured the content.

Anonymous said...

The old interface is so much better. Being able to browse is instrumental and I actually liked having my APIs separate so I could look at one apart from another.

Anonymous said...

It is extremely interesting for me to read that post. Thanks for it. I like such themes and anything that is connected to them. I would like to read a bit more on that blog soon.

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

I wasn't seeing the mootools stuff on your old page, but I spotted it right away on beta. Thanx.

Nick said...

Seems like a giant step backwards? The left bar links don't work no more (Mac/Chrome). I'm quite happy with the old version, just make it so the left bar can be resized on Mac/Chrome (currently this breaks the site)

Anonymous said...

Is this site still maintained? It would be sad if it bitrotted.

SEJeff said...

I *love* gotapi, but sofar, I think the new ui is a major step back in usability.

When I'm looking up a css property, I don't really care about other languages such as html/xml/etc. I know that I want to lookup a css property and not something else.

The new ui means that gotapi is no longer useful for me.

Thomas said...

Id like the browser too, cant you make it expandable on any site (left or where) so that you dont need it but can use it?

Also can you insert the extJS API-somehow?

thanks a lot for your work
greetz from berlin

TechNikh said...

Few questions:
1)When I click on the search result here, http://www.gotapi.com/widgets/compiled/c1_module_html.html
The result is shown on a new page. Instead can I show the results on an iframe below the search box? 2)How flexible is it to configure the widget?
3)Can I show the browse listbox similar to the one shown on your home page? http://www.gotapi.com/html
4)Can I put more than one search widget on a page? If yes How?
looks like gaMod='module_cssw3s.js' is overriding.