SEN finally gets the website it deserves:) - RFC

Software Native
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If you have some spare minutes, I would really appreciate you checking out the new web site for my project SEN. Does it make sense? Do you “get it”?

Bonus points for filling out the short survey hidden behind the “Waitlist” button…

https://sen-labs.org/

PS: large parts were initially coded with AI (grok) assistance, but I had to invest quite some time to get it “right”, first in the conversation, then in manual coding - still it was a great help.

PPS: There is an easter egg that people here will quickly find, I’m sure:)

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80% of the site is empty space, is that intentional?

mobile safari

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There’s still a glitch on mobile with the fade-in effect of the cards, I might disable the effect altogether for now, sorry for the issues. At least it’s consistently across all mobile systems and browsers I’ve tried😅

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Same in Webpositive anyhow. : )

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This is now fixed:)

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Sadly WebPositive/Webkit1 is a bit overloaded with the website, but at least it load and displays now, in a way… :innocent:

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What do you mean by that…? Webkit1 is just an api. We have a recent webkit version… normal websites run just fine, if it works badly you might be doing something in a wierd or inefficient way :wink:

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Na not doing anything strange but the single threaded WebKit 1 API is easily busted with JavaScript and such.
The website works just fine in Firefox and Chrome, also runs smooth on mobile.

I guess it’s a similar issue as with GitHub and other more complex websites that easily bog down Webpositive, although that has fortunately improved a lot in recent nightlies.

That said, I’m not a web developer so there might still be room for improvement, but grok found no glaring performance issues at least :wink:

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I highly doubt that grok can find performance issues. Most problems with websites in webpositive arise because of massive overcomplication of websites.

Your website is effectively a slideshow with some links and a really wierd unusable UI.

Personally I would, if you want a slideshow, do it like a slideshow. For example the Haiku one: Haiku Slideshow | Haiku Project

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I looked a bit at it with safari;

It is inaproproate to contact third party servers directly. This facilitates cross site tracking, and may be a violation of EU law.

Currenlty you have
fonts.gstatic.org for a font, you can self-host this

img.youtube.com for a preview image. You should copy this image and put it on your server, or remove it.

unpkg.css yet another font, and css. If a font is really needed one ought zo be enough?

substackcdn some random stock photo for a rss feed? Why is this not a rss subscribe button?

cdn.jsdeliver.net some js for “particles”?

ims.shields.io some button that sais “Sponsor”. This can be self-hosted aswell

The site ignores the low motion querry, depsite heavy animations in the backgroun.

The site does not set the color-scheme property despite beeing in dark mode all the time. This will cause The browser to render all controls (including the scroll bar) in light mode instead of dark mode (except for webkit overlay scrollbars)

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Run your site through https://pagespeed.web.dev and see what needs to be optimized.

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@nephele please, I appreciate your time and effort, but keep it civilised and constructive.
It’s not OK to be judmental and negative towards other people’s work, even spreading FUD about illegal activity against EU law - believe me, I’m familiar with the GDPR, and it’s not only perfectly fine but absolutely common practice to reference external assets in your web pages.

Also, I accept your different taste, but I made a deliberate decision on how to present my own project and would kindly ask you to accept that.
It does the job well, I got very positive feedback, and the aim was not to build a minimalistic web site for purist web developers geeking out over the latest web standards, but to have a decent landing page with some glimpses into the features, and to appeal to potential partners and funding agencies, which couldn’t care less if it runs optimized for WebPositive.

Lastly, the “weird UI” you mention is a nod to Haiku and BeOS UX, heck you can even drag and move the tabs, these are sliding tabs - here, I spillede the Easter egg for you:)
If you don’t like it, I guess you have some different skin/UI hack on your Haiku installation…

That being said, I actually asked for feedback on the content, not on technicalities.
I can optimise later, but need people not familiar with Haiku to get it, mainly people of the personal knowledge management domain.

Rest assured, I take all constructive points into account for the optimising run, I also got some good points raised by grok, believe it or not, e.g. lazy loading and caching preview images (they are fetched by a dynamic workflow on Github btw, so it’s not just really static).

However I don’t see any performance impact on my local system or on mobile, and nobody complained about any such issues so far.
(OTOH just try to open a blog article on Medium, and WebPositive takes off…)

So let me ask again, content wise, do you get what the project does, do you think also people unfamiliar with Haiku will understand?

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No, because the slideshow aspect does not Work, that is what I ment with wierd UI. The Screenshots are all cut off and change to other stuff if you hover or scroll.
A mobile website I can’t scroll because the event gets hijacked to instead do nothing isn’t nice.

I don’t get your response. I wasn’t rude or unconstructive, your initial link did not work at all, so after the fix I did give some more feedback. Even if you would rather not have technical feedback (and it was not clear to me that you didn’t at the time) I don’t understand why you are so hostile about it. To me a website is a

complete package, presentation and content, and those don’t work wirhout each other.

In any case, I don’t really understand what the website wants to tell me either. (compared to a non-haiku user)
Among other things because I can’t figure out what the cutoff screenshots should show me, or why they change when i try to scroll down the page. Additionally they are in the inverse color scheme to the site itself, making it quite hard to read both the image and the text, since I was trying to figure out what the images do, atleast on mobile, the text was not really in focus.

This is why i mentioned the low motion cue, this will enable people to understand this without the animation.
(And no, this is not geeking out over web standards. This works perfectly fine on all apple devices I have, and even apple uses this on their own sites to reduce animations for e.g their iPhone commercial sites)

I was not beeing negative. Critizism is not an inherently negative thing.

If you think you know better, that is your legal risk to bear; I know of enough people who were sued over google fonts. I don’t see why you see the need of calling this FUD.

Ah yes, the website that needs mb of content to show a blank paywall…
WebPositive is not optimized in some parts, sure. But this is neither the fault of webkit1 or of webkit itself, and I don’t understand why you keep bringing this up.

Then again, I don’t see why you’d be suprised about people checking out your site in WebPositive considering you asked on the Haiku forum…
regardless, I had no performance problems with webpositive loading the site on my computer.

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I´ll admit I do not know enough about what Sen does.

From the perspective of someone who knows a little about what it, and that was directed to the site by someone saying that SEN would do what I am looking for :

  • Those pictures that change when you hover them : should they open some other page when clicked ? Here on Firefox they didn´t.
  • I found those “stars” moving in the background distracting. Maybe a matter of taste.
  • As someone looking about the thing : I couldn´t see in the page what SEN does, what is its use, and for what would I use it. The pictures show some menus, probably any person not familiar with Haiku would think it somehow refers to ( old-style ) MS Windows Start Menu.

To answer your question , I “don´t get it”.
I´m speaking only about the site. Is seems to me like so many pages that seem to be based on the same Wordpress theme, where it is repeated a lot of times that “our product is very good”, and that many big companies use it. But when you look for what is the product, what id does, how it works, that information is very well hidden.

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I’ll admit that the site did not tell me much about SEN. It is loaded with unfamiliar buzzwords. Still, if you are trying to attract PKM people rather than Haiku people that may not matter.

I did watch the linked video and I think that made things a bit clearer. The BFS file system is the equivalent of a flat-file database. You are building it out to the equivalent of a relational database.

How’m I doing?

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Since there have apparently already been some minor misunderstandings, I’ll now comment purely on the content – ​​insofar as it can be clearly differentiated. I’m now familiar with both BeOS and Haiku on the one hand, and tools like Obsidian and devonTHINK on the other, and therefore perhaps not the typical audience? With the little information I already had about SEN, I can get by on the website, but I wonder what it would be like without this prior “knowledge”? My own heart swells when I see Haiku screenshots – I don’t know how it is for typical Windows or Mac users?

In general, I would ask myself: Is it an application (and if so, for which OS)? Is it perhaps a new file system? Or is it a browser-based SaaS offering? And unfortunately we also know that nowadays nobody takes the time and just wants to quickly scan all the content :frowning:

Of course, I realize that the idea isn’t that easy to communicate, and I’m the last person to immediately see complexity as something negative that should be avoided. But an early classification would be helpful, especially for interested users who haven’t yet stumbled upon Haiku. Maybe you can make a virtue out of necessity, like “this isn’t the umpteenth superficial app with a subscription model, but a truly fresh approach”?

But this is not meant as a complaint, and thank you for your great work and openness.

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Thanks for the clarification, I’m glad I got you wrong there and apologize. However when you read your replies again you might understand how they could be easily misunderstood as they mixed your personal hard opinions with some good points, and the tone was quite harsh, at least for me as a non-native speaker.

I needed to get a good looking first impression ready for the LocalFirst conf in Berlin which I’ll be attending next week, so the focus was on content, not code.

However you were semi-right about the GDPR/fonts f*ckup, some shady lawyers tried to make quick money out of it in 2022 and scared off website owners, but there is now (as of 2023) an agreement that works for most cases, e.g. Google fonts.
I will still download and host them myself though to be on the safe side and to increase page loading speed. (GDPR wise completely ridiculous as anything hosted on Github might be routed over US servers anyway…).

You talk about a slide show, but this is something completely different.
I present some core concepts in feature cards that are enlarged and animated on hover.
What you perceive as weird UI is absolutely intended and has not confused anyone else yet…

As for WebPositive: yes of course I want to support Haiku’s native browser and I love and use it a lot myself, but it’s just too limited for many standard web sites out there, and we sadly cannot force big sites like Medium to streamline and behave, so the browser has to cope with it.
Same goes for the OS - we can enforce memory management, resource usage etc. but we cannot force developers to write performant high quality code.

Also, in Haiku, at least for the more advanced web sites or some more heavy weight ones (which SEN is certainly not), there is now luckily IceWeasel…

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that’s pretty much it, yes. :slight_smile:
But you shouldn’t have to watch the video to get it, so it’s my fault.

I originally had a bigger illustration planned that incrementally transforms from a hand drawn knowledge graph into something resembling a typical SEN workspace, but then scrapped it to strip down the vertical size of the page.
Seems this illustration was justified after all and it’s ready for a comeback:)

Thanks to all peopple that filled out the survey so far, and remember, I’m doing this on a personal shoestring budget, so any support would be highly appreciated… :wink:

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don’t be afraid, I won’t bite, I’m really a harmonic person normally:)
Just got triggered as I spent the better part of 3 weeks on the web site and all I got was negative vibes - at least it felt that way, but maybe I was just not in a good mood, sorry for that;-)

Your points are constructive and valid, I have to admit there is still room for improvement.
As mentionend in my other reply, I will put back that illustration and see if that helps.

The screenshots are also more or less placeholders and will be refined later.
I just needed to do them in Haiku and found no tool to support zooming/panning, which is really a shame. So BeScreenCapture had to suffice, it’s not bad but limited.

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Maybe this is a bug in the site concerning safari then? There is no animation at all, it just (very jarringly) switches to a different picture instantly once hovered or scrolled. This looked to me like one of those websites that hijack the scroll event for a slideshow, and not like an animateion.

I sometimes boot my Haiku disk from another disk running Linux, that is qemu booting the existing install in a KVM instead. You can then capture the video output with linux video capture tools.
(I did this for the webkit code stream I did for example)