What I liked best about the old design...

[rick]

OK, here's the place. Presuming there actually were aspects of the old design which you liked, then what were they? What elements of prior designs woulc you be most concerned about carrying forward into the new design and future ones?

If you can be specific and positive here, then this can be an enormously useful thread to help us understand what you like.

[mende]

Rick, I think that I've posted that somewhere else in this form but you've opened a new Thread so I place some of my personal favorites here:

The new releases section, which was on the upper right side of the old layout. It was great because I could see fastly if there is something new released.

The other point was the dzone-ad on the right side. It was always nice to see behind the curtain of java development and see some other articles.

[jonj]

I basically miss all the main sections of the old javalobby site.

1) Popular @ dzone links.

These links were kind of convenient. I primarily visit javalobby - not dzone. It was nice to be able to see popular java related dzone topics within the main javalobby page.

2) Tips and tricks

I liked this section. It usually contained brief little tidbits on various tools or libraries.

3) Announcements

I miss the announcements section, even if I hardly ever clicked on any of them

[qualidafial]

I second jonj's list: popular @ dzone, tips and tricks, announcements

I generally miss the "dashboard" feel of javalobby and eclipsezone.

[matt]

Thanks for the feedback. I belive that we'll have something soon that helps put these back in place.

[pago]

The ability to distingish between read and unread comments. That was great. Currently it's totaly impossible to follow any discussion (from the few that take place) because I don't know which message I've already read and which I haven't. Don't know if that applies only to threaded mode, though.
So, basicly the thing I miss the most is the old threaded view where I had a tree of titles of replies, could select one, read it and make the small icon fade, letting me know I already read that message.

One way to fix it (that I would be happy with): mark unread comments with a different color and let me mark it as read individually. Thats better than colorizing based on a timestamp because I won't necessarily read all new comments in a discussion at once. If unmarking was automated, I'd lose the unread comments.

Any chance you could fix that?