Unless you read this site entirely from the com­fort of your RSS reader, you’ve prob­a­bly noticed the changes to Sidearm. I decided it was time to clean up the visu­als and adhere to a more con­sis­tent theme while increas­ing func­tion­al­ity and adding some much-needed fea­tures. This should prob­a­bly be con­sid­ered ver­sion 1.5 because it’s not opti­mized and I’m plan­ning on doing a com­plete redesign in the next 6 months.

For the over­all look, I wanted to cre­ate a sort of retro-futurist aes­thetic, bring­ing in ele­ments of mod­ernism, art deco, and sci­ence fic­tion. The most obvi­ous homage being the fad­ing but­tons in the side­bar which were directly inspired by Star Trek’s com­puter panels.

The side­bar has seen most of the changes. I’ve added a newslet­ter signup, an audio player for K9000 songs, and the new but­tons that I’ve already men­tioned. The side­bar is get­ting pretty lengthy and I know that it will get even longer, so I’m exper­i­ment­ing with space-saving ideas. It’s still exper­i­men­tal at this point but some of the sec­tion head­ers can be clicked to tog­gle that sec­tion on or off. Try click­ing Cat­e­gories for instance.

All of the new ani­ma­tion is being done with jQuery (not flash) so it should be cross browser com­pli­ant, but I have no idea what kind of per­for­mance hit it might be cre­at­ing, espe­cially on low-powered com­put­ers. Let me know if they’re caus­ing major prob­lems. I’ll be doing a write up on jQuery soon, but I would highly rec­om­mended check­ing it out now because it makes javascript about as easy as CSS (in fact, in some ways it’s even easier).