4 min read
A New Home for AppMockUp Studio, and a Hint of What Is Next
Dan DeaconuCEO & Designer, AppMockUp
- Announcement
- Website
The editor has changed a great deal this year. The website around it had not, until today. app-mockup.com has been rebuilt from the ground up: a new look, in light and dark, pages that load far faster, and a help center you can actually find things in.
It is also the first visible piece of something bigger. More on that at the end.
A new look, in light and dark
The old site came in one colour: black. The new one follows your system, and you can switch it yourself from the footer. Both themes were drawn, not inverted, so the light one is not an afterthought.
Glass and glow
The navigation is a pane of glass that pages scroll beneath. The Start Designing button carries a glow in the brand's purple, pink and orange that comes alive under your pointer, and the same light rises along the edge of the footer at the bottom of every page.
Screenshots you can grab
Every moving row of screenshots on the site can be picked up and thrown with the mouse: the columns on the home page, the testimonials, the rows inside each feature card and the strips on the Examples page. On a phone they scroll under your finger as they always did.
A blog with covers of its own
Most posts here were published without artwork, so the blog now draws a cover from what each post is about: waves for the post about wavy underlines, a title being typed into for inline text editing, a screenshot wearing its selection handles for editing on the canvas.
If you prefer less motion, the site listens. With reduced motion switched on in your system nothing drifts, glows or glides; everything is simply where it should be.
Faster, because it is simpler
The new site is plain files. There is no server assembling pages when you ask for them; every page is built ahead of time and handed over as it is.
- Images are sized for your screen. Every screenshot on the site sits beside smaller copies of itself in a modern format, and your browser is given the one that fits. In our tests the home page came out about 40% lighter than before.
- Nothing waits for scripts. Headlines, text and images are in the page itself and show before any JavaScript has arrived. The heavy parts, such as the 3D mesh gradient on the home page, are only fetched as you scroll near them.
- Clips load when you reach them. Videos in posts and guides cost nothing until they are about to come on screen.
A help center built like documentation
The help center used to be a list of lists. It is now laid out the way developer documentation is, because that is who reads it.
Everything in one menu
Every guide is in a menu down the left, grouped by topic, with a filter box on top. Press / anywhere in the help center and start typing. Guides we have not written yet are listed too, marked "Soon", so you can see what is coming rather than wonder whether it exists.
On this page
Longer guides list their sections on the right and mark the one you are reading. Every guide ends with the previous and the next, so a topic can be read straight through.
New guides, with clips
September's releases came with guides of their own: editing text on the canvas, creating screenshots from images, applying a style to all screenshots, continuing a device onto the next screenshot and a full list of keyboard shortcuts. Most open on a short clip, played by the site itself with controls that match it.
Private by default
The site asks once whether it may count your visit, in a small card in the corner that never blocks the page. Until you say yes, nothing from Google Analytics is loaded at all: no script, no cookie. Say no and the site works exactly the same. If your browser sends Global Privacy Control you are not even asked, and you can change your answer at any time from "Cookie settings" in the footer.
Smaller things
- About and Contact are new. About says who we are and why AppMockUp exists. Contact puts the email address first, with a button to copy it and shortcuts for reporting a bug or requesting a feature.
- An RSS feed for this blog, at /blog/feed.xml, for those who read the web that way.
- Every address still works. Links to the old site, from bookmarks to search results, land on the same page as before.
- Easier for machines to read, too. Pages describe themselves to search engines, and an
llms.txttells AI assistants what AppMockUp Studio is and does, in our own words, so they have less reason to guess.
A website is a promise about the product behind it. Ours had fallen behind the product.
One more thing
The website is not the big news. It is the part we could show you first.
For a good while now we have been working on something much larger than a redesign: the future of AppMockUp Studio. We are not ready to say more yet, and we would rather show it than describe it. It is coming soon.
If you want to be there when it lands, follow @appmockup or subscribe to the feed. This is where it will be announced.
Until then, the editor is where it has always been: free, in your browser, no account. Have a look around the new site, and if something is broken or could be better, tell us.
No account required.
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