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Bvckup 2

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apankrat:
Well, I hear you guys, but let me tell you my side of story.

Take a design, simplify it, strip all cruft, polish typography, add space, trim and trim again copy, add more space, split visually into sections and then make it marginally less flat. Guess what? It looks like something Apple would make.

They did not invent the style. It is a logical convergence point for many design styles that are iterated towards simpler versions. Apple popularized the style, that's for sure. And I fully understand that it is now associated with them, but do tell me what is it that non-Apple projects should do? Add color? Make things cramped and line-height smaller? I mean all those small things that comprise "Apple style" are based on fundamental design principles. And to ignore them just to be not mistaken for an Apple product - I am not sure if it's better than to have few fast-finger people leave due to confusion.

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With regards to the scrolling thing and first page taking up full screen - again, this is unconventional on purpose. While this is an experiment, the idea is to make site's visitors stop and pay some attention. I am not after force-feeding 3 keywords in a terrible rush before he manages to escape from the page mere half second after loading it. I want more time, I want to form a memory.

PS. Just looked in the logs and it appears that the median time on site is well over half a minute. I think this is fan-tas-tic, Mac feel or not :)

apankrat:
Additionally, I get a distinct 'the user is an idiot' feeling from the website; if they go to the website, nobody wants to waste 3s staring at a logo, then eventually figuring hey I have to scroll down despite having a gigantic screen that I got to minimize the need to scroll.-worstje (June 29, 2011, 07:01 AM)
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This is a very pragmatic way of looking at things. I am not really sure if I want to deal with people who get upset by their monitor real estate not being fully utilized by a web designer :)

Websites are intended to supply information; yours just gets in the way of its purpose in the same way those MPAA 'do not steal', FBI etc screens on a movie get in the way of what the (in that case legit!) user wants to do: watch their movie. The current website seems designed as if it were a presentation: because when someone is talking alongside sheets, you don't want tons of texts, and you have distinct screens to go with subjects.
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It is a product announcement site. Consider it a more elaborate version of "Startup Xyz launching soon... <newsletter subscription form>" one-pager. If it were a real product site, it would have not most certainly have a splash page, nor it would've had copious amount of whitespace or trimmed down copy. It will be far more detailed, technical and in point. This will come, but the current site is a teaser and so it has an odd format geared towards generating interest rather then selling a product.

The point of a beta is to get feedback. Make beta licenses need some sort of feedback flag which you can trigger when you get feedback; for example through posting on your forum (although I wouldn't automate it or you only add spamming to your problem), or by having the license used for at least 24 hours or some other time-limit thing. Probably you want to combine them so the people that do not find any bugs don't get shafted by the concept. If you combine it with some basic IP checks, you can probably keep out most of the automated buggers.

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Interesting idea. Noted.

steeladept:
I have been lurking this thread for a while, and I think the key things that make the Appl-ish look Appl-ish, is the fact that you cut so much as to say nothing and use a single neutral monochromatic scheme.  So far, (since Apple reinvented itself with the iPod - this doesn't necessarily apply previous to that) Apple has always used, white or black (almost exclusively), with gray accents which tell you nothing about the product except what they want you to know - It's Apple.  In their marketing scheme, knowing "It's Apple" is the end-all be-all to what you need to know.  It's Apple, so you must have it.

Now to your design aesthetic.  It does speak to many of the things Apple does. No, they didn't invent minimalism, but they did bring a new and perhaps refined awareness of the design concept to many who never paid attention to it previously.  The arguments I see here revolve around 1) how little is too little, and 2) how different is too different.

The thing to remember - ALWAYS - is the web is only a method of communication.  If people don't understand what you are communicating, it fails.  Think about what you want to communicate, instead of how, and then once you know, make sure it comes through on the first page.  After that, navigation is useful only for getting more details.  If there is no important details, then navigation is not necessary.  Otherwise, when you get to the how, make sure you understand what the user sees and that they understand how to navigate the site - be it links, scrolling, whatever.  If you keep these two thoughts at the forefront, then you are FAR less likely to confuse when you get to the how.

My personal suggestion - take the minimalist idea down just a notch, add a touch of color, and fix navigation, and the rest should be fine.  Unlike Apple, the whole world doesn't know everything about you and your product just by the name, so the minimalism is a bit too minimal on that site. You added a bit since I was there last  :P  I think it says enough about it, just the navigation is a bit, um, unorthodox?

andhar:
Yay, there is a bvckup2 coming? I used the beta of V1 1.5 years ago and was amazed of it (there were a few problems I posted about but I was able to work with it ;) ).
Now I just wanted to see if there were updates availabe or a complete "out-of-beta" release (as I searched for a good backup solution for my files again) and just found the thread for V2. Looking forward to it! :)

ah...last post is from last year....are there any news?

apankrat:
I got several things piled up last year and I am still digging my way out of it. There are several projects that I am working on, and I am actively trying to trim their number down to just two. One of them is Bvckup. Bvckup2 is a major rework of the code and I have done a fair amount of coding of the supporting libraries (the UI lib is done, the threading/tasklet engine is about half way through, and there are two other). Once libraries are done, I will be putting the actual v2 app together. Before that I am planning to release separate smaller demos for each library and for some combined functionality.

I might've mentioned before, the scanning module (the one that traverses the directory tree and collects the file information) is now redone to work in a highly parallel fashion, and it is incredibly fast. When scanning the local disk, it utilizes all available CPU cores to pipe the data out of the OS and into the app. Faster, but it's nothing compared to the remote share scans. These go over the network, so there's quite a bit of latency involved, and the app typically sits there idle waiting for the remote side to reply. By launching multiple queries in parallel, it's possible to speed to whole process up by a factor of 10 (!). The scan of my NAS used to take 40-45 seconds, now it's down to 2-3 seconds.

So bear with me, there's some really cool stuff in the works. You won't be disappointed :)

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