Printable catalog (PDF)
Over the past couple of weeks, the team working on the new Adafruit Learning System has been churning out updates almost daily. Having a nice small team allows us to test, tweak, update, and deploy rapidly. Here are some of the highlights of the last few updates:
- We have done a lot to optimize the PDF downloads. With this latest update we have made images in the PDF larger, got Github Gists to display correctly, and included text at the end to know how older your downloaded version is. A Github Gist is Gist is a simple way to share snippets and pastes with others. All gists are git repositories, so they are automatically versioned, forkable and usable as a git repository. Learn more about how Gists work here, and see a demo of a Gist in the Learning System here.
- Many new mobile device enhancements.
- We can now embed time encoded Youtube videos. This allows us to embed a video and have it start at a certain time (get to the good stuff). Here is an example of this feature in use.
- Similar to what we did with the Adafruit.com store, we have implemented search using Sphinx for fast and reliable results. Learn more about the Open Source Sphinx search system here.
- We have made a lot of changes to the homepage, mainly on the admin side, to allow our team to work together in an efficient way.
- Our biggest update was probably the ‘Featured in this Guide’ sidebar. This is a great way to see exactly what Adafruit products are being used in that particular guide so you can make sure you have the right stuff on hand.
- We love the way the Adafruit Learning System looks and acts on mobile devices, but couldn’t stand looking at a pixelated logo on a retina display. Now all graphics, and the logo are retina ready.
We have a ton of new updates in the works, and will keep you up to date on our progress. Thanks for all of the positive responses we have gotten thus far!
FEED
A request: You have blue URL links to Adafruit parts used in a tutorial but links are not print-friendly. Most DIY tutorials have traditionally used a Bill of Materials (radio shack puts this rather front and center, even with store lists with part numbers and check boxes) – I don’t think the Radio Shack way is quite the thing to do but a print friendly clear list of parts one would want to gather would be nice (and it helps to know if you have all the parts you want to jump into the project). Thank you for your consideration.
Comment by Mike — July 23, 2012 @ 6:24 pm
hi mike!
we’ve been talking about be adding auto-expanded URLs and a “bill of materials” at the end of the printed PDFs in some way or another.
great feedback, thanks!
Comment by adafruit — July 23, 2012 @ 6:29 pm
This is really exciting. I was just complaining that we needed a good system to load training material. I’m so happy to see a really well thought out one here.
Comment by Larissa Swanland — July 23, 2012 @ 11:39 pm
You guys are really rocking this learning system. Super well done and getting better fast!
+1 for github and gists
+1 for using rails
+1 nice bootstrap implementation
+1000 excellent content!
(y)
Comment by foz — July 24, 2012 @ 3:44 pm