New Cesium website

We’ve been working on getting a new Cesium website built over the last few months, and we’ve now deployed it publicly:

http://cesium.cloudapp.net/

(temporary host name on the Azure cloud, we will be changing the cesium.agi.com DNS to point to the new server soon)

Kristian Calhoun did most of the work to build the new site. Some highlights:

  • Sandcastle now fully replaces the old Sandbox for live code editing and and examples.

  • A new blog for longer-form articles about Cesium, WebGL and other topics.

We also have a page showcasing various demo applications beyond the Sandcastle examples. If anyone else has an application that they’d like us to feature on the page, or host on the site, e-mail the dev list or Patrick.

Looking great so far! One small suggestion, we should put some kind of a page on here:

http://cesium.cloudapp.net/czml.html

There are a number of references to that from GitHub and other places that would become broken links if we don’t have a CZML landing page there.

Also, the US States and C4ISR demos appear to be broken.

Good catch. Those CZML files aren’t in the main Cesium repository (for file size reasons), but they’re now up on the site and the demos are working.

As soon as time allows, I’d like for us to come up with a new set of sample files that show a wider range of Cesium usage than the demos we have there now. The current demos just happened by accident more than anything else.

I totally agree with Matt. In fact, we have it on the roadmap for the website.

Patrick

I hate to say this, but the site is not mobile friendly. Even on landscape mobile, the page is too wide. Also if you stop scrolling the page with the embedded Cesium viewer filling your whole view, there’s no way to scroll the page itself again (because touch events are used by the viewer).

I’m not sure what we can do about the latter other than check the page size on load and don’t embed a viewer on pages smaller than the inset window (or use CSS media-type screen sizes to do the same).

I’ll work on some better recommendations tomorrow as time permits.

–Ed.

Could you force all touch gestures to use 2 fingers? Then, single-finger gestures would always be interpreted by the browser, and you would never get stuck in a state where you can’t scroll.

I noticed that the site layout worked fine in Chrome on my Nexus 7 (though, of course, there was no 3D). I don’t know why Firefox’s default zoom was so strange.

Good thought, but no, we need too many degrees of freedom to navigate around the globe and near-Earth space. Also, if the inset window is larger than a phone’s browser window, it’s not very useful as an inset. On such small screens it’s better to have Cesium come up full-screen if/when it opens at all.

      --Ed.

We can address the mobile issues and cleanup demos as time permits. Are there any show-stoppers for making this site live?

Thanks,

Patrick

I think an auto-running live demo on the front page is a bad idea for now; not until we improve start up time by a lot. I would rather see the default image with a “play” button in the middle that lets users start the demo.

I hit send too soon, sorry. More random thoughts and ideas to spur conversation. These are pretty unfiltered, so I apologize if I offend anyone.

Documentation, Publications, Forum, FAQ, and Wiki all open new windows and take the user off site. I think this is pretty jarring. Normally links like this at the top of the page simply navigate to a different page on the same site. I vote that we do what we have to to make publications, documentation and FAQ look like just another part of the website. Wiki should be renamed to “Github wiki” and Forum should be renamed to Cesium Google Group or similar, to make it clear that those links are taking the user somewhere else. Another idea: maybe we can have a description pop up in the white space under these links that changes as you mouse over each one?

Regardless of mobile, I still think the site is way to wide, it just looks “oversized” as if I’m browsing at a low-resolution or hit the zoom button. The “Fork me on Github” manner overlaps the Documentation link for me, since I don’t browse full screen all of the time.

“Getting Started” and “View Demos” buttons seem almost hidden at the bottom of the page. Why not a “Get latest version” right at the top of the page that grabs the zip release directly. Then inside the zip release there should be a GettingStarted.md, maybe it should be rolled into the README? When I go get a product, I just want to download it, it takes way too many clicks on our site.

For each of the 7 links in the “header” section, we should have a paragraph/blurb about on the main page like we do for Wiki/Live Coding/Blog. I’m not sure “Live Coding” belongs front in center here either, and wold just relegate it to the demos page. I also don’t like the term “Live coding” it has no meaning to me. Even something like “Jump right in” is better to me than live coding.

The website looks great, regarding your mobile/desktop issue, the fix is SIMPLE:

Skeleton CSS

http://www.getskeleton.com/

Using this simple free open-source framework, your website will be mobile friendly with a tiny footprint. Here is my website based on this skeleton:

http://rezn8d.com/

Hope this helps =)

ps. when I hit the fullscreen button on the cesium embed, my browser went fullscreen, and the embed did not.

A few updates - http://cesium.cloudapp.net/ (force refresh)

Lots of good ideas here. Comments below.

I think an auto-running live demo on the front page is a bad idea for now; not until we improve start up time by a lot. I would rather see the default image with a “play” button in the middle that lets users start the demo.

Agreed. It is too slow on my laptop. When we work on shader compile time, we should be able to auto-run again.

“Getting Started” and “View Demos” buttons seem almost hidden at the bottom of the page

Agreed. Moved.

A lot of the other comments are good too. I put them on the roadmap so we can work on them when we have bandwidth. In the meantime, we have a few upcoming events that call for this site to go live shortly so I put in a request to change cesium.agi.com to point to it.

Patrick

Looks like it’s live at http://cesium.agi.com