A.D.A. Amiga Demoscene Archive

On 11 november 2006, in a couple of weeks, A.D.A will be online for 5 years. When we started on this "little" project, we had no idea that it would grow so much and turn out as big. But we had fun while working on and maintaining the site. We always tried to bring the best. We are quite proud of our 5800 or so screenshots with 556 demos. And we are still motivated to go on, in fact still as much as in the very beginning :o)

However, in all those years, we hardly received any new ideas, bug or frustration reports or anything of that kind. This could mean a couple of things. Either we don't have many visitors. However the fact that we are in a solid 2nd place in the untergrund stats seems to tell us otherwise. Or maybe, just maybe, we are doing a good job and there isn't a lot of frustration and bugs or anything of that kind. Or visitors just don't like to give feedback and just accept the site as it is.

I would very much like to start a discussion on A.D.A. What do you like, what don't you like? Is the navigation straightforward? What features do you want to see added? What do you miss on the site? Anything really. It would help us improving the site because the way it is now, we ourselves don't really know what to change/how to improve.

For me the site is working really great, the only possible grip would be that there is no autologin via permanent cookie, but this is very good solved here bcos of the login+post combo ^^

The site is pretty much perfect, windens suggestion sounds good. Another thing is that it would look nicer if the forum had a consistent design with the rest of the site. But both these things are very minor, as a whole the site is pretty much perfect.

I agree with the others, dont try to fix whats not broken :)

Perfect site imho.

there's one little thing.

when you browse the site and decide to login, you're forwarded to the "home" page. it has annoyed me some times when I had to go through the list of demos to get back again.

I only get the Okido! message. then back a page, and reload. voila! I am now logged in !! top notch bostin site Z5!

@dalton:
Good point. I'm going to change that.

@bonkers:
I agree. Skinning the forum to the actual A.D.A design has been on our to-do list ... well since we had the new design. It's quite easy to do with an css file so i hope to get this done soon. I've always been a bit reluctant because it's a ready made forum which is upgraded quite often. But consider it done :o)

@all:
Common... try a bit harder :o) Any new features you would like to see. Should we stick to doing demos or should we add graphics, music,...? Also, i'm interested: is anybody using the looonnnggg demo list to navigate this site? It's getting quite long so i wonder if i shouldn't do it differently (for example with a group list, and when you click on a group you see the demos).
Ohter ideas include a link to Pouet for each demo (as suggested by Winden), maybe complete party results with graphics and music (like demon download), avatar's (like pouet),...

In the meantime, i have skinned the forum. It's work-in-progress: banner, icons and colors still to do and finetune :o)

Sadly, amiga users won't notice this :o(

@dalton:
This should be fixed now. If you login and click continue, you will be brought back to the previous page.

@z5, about the long demo list, i really prefer all of it in one page, but maybe things could be improved:

1. it's reloaded each time even if not changed... is there any way you can control the http headers from php so that it only gets reloaded when it has changed?

2. related to that, when clicking in a letter at the top, it reloads all page just to jump to a part of the just-loaded page

What about a preview button when entering text and replyes would help if you nedded to explain something complicated, i have terrible word editing skills :) And maybe special math symbols could be helpfull in code section.

nice look for forums now! ;D

@Winden:

About the reloading: that's why i included a "back to last page" link when viewing a demo (it's at the top of the page).

- visitor goes to demolist page
- visitor can do a sort by year,... here too
- visitor clicks on a demo
- "back to last page" brings the visitor back to the (sorted) demo list

About the reloading when selecting a letter... good point. I'll see if i can change that.

@Cefa:
Indeed, a preview button would be nice so i'll see what i can do. Maybe add the ability to use bbcode aswell. I'll look into that.

@winden:

There shouldn't be any reloading anymore. The reloading was when you did the 'back to top'. Together with the 'back to last page', it should be comfortable using the list.

I'll think of some more improvements for this list.

wow, nice and fast that work! It worked perfect here selecting a letter without reloading on safari from osx 10.3 \o/

@winden:
I always wondered: how does the site look on safari? I know how it looks on Opera, Firefox and IE, and also IBrowse but never had the opportunity to test it on Mac. Have you ever surfed the site on a pc and does it look the same?

Did another small change in the navigation on the long demo list. The navigation bar now only has the letters which are necessary (so no Q or Y anymore because no group on A.D.A begins with that letter) => less dead links.

At home I only use safari 10.3 for browsing and it works great... sometimes Ive peeked at ada from work using firefox 1.5 and it looked the same afaik...

I think it would be cool if it was possible to see a list of active sceners, who would be interested in participating in projects. I could really use a nice table (or something) with coloumns representing Artistname, Function (gfx,msx,code), worksample/link to artist website, Contactinfo.

This would require that people actually used some sign up form, which they could submit. Of course it should be possible to edit their info (included removing themselves from the list again). A sortingfunction based on the Function would also be very helpful.

z5, the "featuring" box on the front page is new, is it? I find it rather cool as a way to help lazy asses to get a random prod suggested for commenting and voting on each visit ^_^

@Winden:
Yep, and you guessed the purpose of it aswell :o) (by the way, if you are logged in, you will see your vote there aswell)

@Corial:
While this might have been a good idea years ago, i think it wouldn't have much purpose here today. Most active sceners are in touch with each other anyway i guess and already in a group. On top of that, there doesn't seem to be that many active sceners anymore. However, maybe we can do something in the forum for that (making a separate category or something like that)

@z5, somethng which could be improved is to allow the images to be eith natural size or doublesize depending on a option of the user... this could be done by just tagging the files on the html with the proper doublesized values so that it's the user browser who scales up and then it does not need any more time to download. For auto-extracting the image size from code, I think gd.library from php can provide these data. This is because nowdays people are using big resolutions and looking at a small 320x256 image is not really representative and rather hard to see sometimes...

@winden: the current ada design was done with 800*600 users in mind. The decision to do 160*128 screens (they aren't original files scaled by the browser though but all scaled properly with a paint package) was actually taken in 2001 (i remember timing how long it would take to load the pages and trying to reduce size where possible :o) ... i still had a slow modem back then).

However, i have all screens in original size. So this is definately something to think about when/if we do a new version someday. And so is doing the screens without jpg compression (again, something we decided on in 2001 for download time).

As has been mentioned on the news page, i'm busy adding download links for each tune from each demo on A.D.A. So far i have added about 200. You can find the download links in the left column (last topic) on each demopage.

hey, something I think could be done is, when editing my userinfo page, to have a list of all prods with 4 columns on the side: my score, the total score and 2 buttons. then you could either sort by the personal score or the general score and use the buttons to upgrade/downgrade your personal voting. This would be done without paginating the result so that you can get at-a-glance what you voted on each prod and allow easier relative adjustement like "i always liked A more than B so I'll adjust A upwards or B downwards"

At home I only use safari 10.3 for browsing and it works great... sometimes Ive peeked at ada from work using firefox 1.5 and it looked the same afaik...


Talking about Safari, Apple just released a beta for Safari 3 on Windows.

I must say: with every new piece of software i try from Apple, i completely loose my faith in them. I'm starting to wonder where Apple earned their good reputation from.

Honestly, ever since iTunes 6 for windows, they have released nothing but crap (on Windows at least). Safari doesn't even deserve the name "beta".

Still, i find the iPod a good music playing device.

"...I'm starting to wonder where Apple earned their good reputation from. "

from lots of hype and trendy adverts ;)

i had an ipod too, but having to deal with a proprietory database (ITunes) to store the mp3s on the IPod annoyed me. Apple again trying to stamp their authority in the way we actiually use our mp3s. My friend had an IRiver (i think it was) which allowed you to just drag your files freely onto the device. it seemed much less bothersome than ITunes. anyway, i have no interest in MP3 players these days

we are going offtopic but... i got an ipod exactly because it would just autocopy all new mp3 from itunes, with all the author/name tags, when i connected it to recharge battery.

regarding itunes, the thing i liked best at first when i got a mac was that ripping a complete audio cd to mp3 took only 2 minutes... never had seen any audioripper go so fast!

@z5,

What do you find so bad with Safari 3? I've never really used windows but I've been told that some Apple software are way behind in it's Win version (especially the Quicktime player), but at least on OS X Safari is fantastic.

With the risk of sounding like an Apple fan-boy here, I switched from using Amiga OS (and Solaris at work) to OS X in 2004, the reason was that Apple was the only company doing something innovative in the OS market. Sure most of the things are just adaptations of already existing technology but that's exactly what AmigaOS was all about back in the days, i.e. take Unix and make it more useful. So to me Apple have gotten their good reputation mostly from actually producing good quality software and hardware. Sure there are things that they aren't that good at, one example being that the "Activity Monitor" which surely can only be a graphical front-end to "top" is using up about 220mb of virtual memory, ... why!

Don't get me wrong here. The reason i'm not buying a Mac is mainly the lack of games (i still play adventure games now and again). I have been tempted more and more lately.

And i really like my iPod. Unlike klipper, i love the fact that i don't have to mess with paths, dragging files,... Plug in, update and listen.

However, i've been far from impressed with the software that Apple has released for windows. The safari for windows browser that they released yesterday isn't worth beta (compare that to the firefox 2 beta, which was rock solid) and i have been less than impressed with itunes lately (since v6).

However, it's probably not fair to judge Apple on software they release for Windows.