Loved the article, not a fan of the 2.4MB video of hands typing on an Apple keyboard [1] I was forced to download. I'm just glad I wasn't on a mobile connection (tethered or otherwise) with a bandwidth cap.
I searched for methods to disable MP4 video downloading on both Chrome and Firefox, but they don't appear to work (for Firefox, it was about setting media.autoplay.enabled to false). If anyone knows how I would be able to do so, I would appreciate learning how to.
The whole damn page is 13 MB. It took over a minute to load on my 1.5mbps bandwidth-capped WiMax connection. The tab in Chrome is using over 200MB of memory on my Mac. With chrome using the maximum possible screen real estate, I can't even read the title on my 1440x900 mbp. http://cl.ly/PK8o
Not to mention that on a 13" rMBP it pushes the title below the fold. Doesn't give me a lot of confidence to try their "distraction free" writing interface...
Which is sad, because I've found Medium to be a terrific blogging tool for people who don't want to be full time bloggers.
The interface is really very easy to use, with the only annoying thing being the difficulty in browsing Collections when deciding which one to post your work in.
Not to mention users like me, who opened it in a background tab, never even saw the video playing. I wouldn't have known it was anything but a blurry image if I hadn't seen this comment.
This "designed for laptop" sentiment and (most) of the parallax et al "experience" sites kind of upset me. People use tablets and phones. Acknowledge reality and provide content tolerable to the medium.
I give Teehan+Lax and portfolio sites in general a free pass on this (most important visitors are sitting at desks), but much of the internet seems to willfully disregard audience needs and desires as devices, contexts, and limitations expand.
Wow, great article but terribly designed website. Really slow scrolling, confusing layout, not sure what I could interact with and what I couldn't. (Some elements used the "pointing hand" cursor yet indicating I could click, yet did nothing when I clicked.)
Teehan + Lax is an interactive design agency that does work for multinational corporations. Their site is obviously catered towards clients with big wallets or potential hires. Complaining about bandwidth would make a lot of sense if we were talking about a site catered towards the majority of internet users, like an Amazon, Craigslist, or Reddit. It's like complaining that high end fashion websites don't cater to Internet Explorer 7 when a far greater majority of their users uses view it through iPads or mobile phones.
Actually, I opened it in Chrome on my SGS3 and experienced no problems at all. The page was snappy and responsive to things like scroll, and it loaded quickly. I actually didn't realize there was any problem at all until I read these comments.
I viewed the site on in Chrome on a rMBP and it looked and loaded just as poorly. There's no excuse for having basic fallbacks or a preloading mechanism.
I thought the top bar was nifty. It only showed when you scrolled back up. When you scroll back up you might be looking for a way to continue somewhere else, and that's when they show you the top bar with it's menu.
I really like the idea here, the quality of information has been so badly degraded by spam and status updates that it would be valuable to have a place for meaningful discussions on abstract ideas.
"Medium isn't a big thing because it's special in any way, it's a big thing because it was made by "web celebrities"."
This is dumb to the point of annoying. Did you read the article at all? Lots of great design thinking went into Medium. I'm constantly finding new features on Medium that are very well thought out.
Yes they have a huge problem of not letting the authors own their own work, which is why I will never use Medium as-is, but let's not say nothing is special about it either.
Even if the only thing you want to give them is credit for their beautiful typography, you have to at least them give them.
And the way they've got inline comments working is beautiful.
Like you I have problems with the lack of ownership, it feels like submitting work to a magazine (which appears to be what they're trying to be). I'm looking forward to polished open source clones being created.
That's silly. Medium is another well-executed minimalist design like Svbtle. Neither one of them is particularly ground-breaking, but they are both better executed than 95% of similar web designs. I say this despite the fact that I have always had something of a visceral distaste for blog networks.
i read this article back when it was first released,
but my memory is that the takeaway message was that
if you've got a lot of money to spend on designers,
designers will be quite happy to take it from you. :+)
Yeah, the problem with Medium is that it's beautiful and well designed – almost perfect, really – but the community is so Silicon Valley. I wouldn't want my writing associated with that trash.
Its taken twice the time and 10 times the people and budget to build something half as great as Glipho I guess silicon valley is all about who you know!
I wonder what the reasoning was behind branding the author in the URL path as opposed to as a subdomain. It seems like a very strange approach to take from guys who have done the latter before.
If nothing else it sure makes posts from Medium very annoying on HN because I can't actually tell which blogger's post I'm going to read until I click the link (primarily read on iPad so no hovering).
SEO would be one theory. Pages under the same 'www' subdomain will provide a more positive SEO boost to medium.com than pages under various subdomains.
Why, simply because it's hosted on a different domain? It seems to help people reach an audience wider than they would otherwise, which is anything but bad for branding.
Seriously. The first thing I do if I strongly like or dislike an article is click the name/avatar to get more information about the author to better understand their background. Medium pushes me onto a page with the rest of their articles instead of a profile and I then have to hope that I can use Google to find their Twitter or website based on the small amount of information in their user blurb (because it doesn't force them to include either).
I searched for methods to disable MP4 video downloading on both Chrome and Firefox, but they don't appear to work (for Firefox, it was about setting media.autoplay.enabled to false). If anyone knows how I would be able to do so, I would appreciate learning how to.
[1] http://www.teehanlax.com/resources/img/story/medium/header.m... (2.4MB)