Moving forward with Formula Editor: download de preview and help achieve great conceptual design
Over the past few months, I have made several changes on Formula’s backend. Now is time to update the user experience and the design, and I feel excited about where things are going.
The goal is to make Formula a powerful source code editor, beautiful and easy to learn. Mostly of the users are students, so expect new features for learning how to code.
Making a brilliant design
For me, Formula is about the community – you probably don’t know, but the name was chosen by a twitter pool – and the design. The Microsoft Fluent Design is the biggest inspiration, and again, what community does with it represent another great inspiration, look at what they did when prototyping a code editor for Windows 10 with Fluent Design?
Those designs were made by @zeealeid and @MikeWestDesign follow then to be amassed by many other concepts.
And why not to make it happen? Why most app doesn’t try to achieve that? Does it need to be just a concept? Since day one, this is a goal for Formula, and now this quest goes on and now I hope you can help me achieve this.
How to help achieve the best design possible?
There is three ways to help achieve this amazing conceptual design while I work hard to make it happen. So here it is:
Download the preview app
For years, the preview app was sent to the beta group via Dropbox, or OneDrive, or anything that would require a lot of work to install, and sometimes, you couldn’t even install it. This problem is solved now!
Now the app will be available at the Microsoft Store and you can download directly by there. Every new bit will arrive there first. For now, it will be like installing another app (with the title preview of course), and you can sideload it with the production version.
download preview app;The link is available for everyone who wants to join, you don’t need a license or a key from Formula to use it but expect bugs and unpolished interfaces. It is not the same experience.
For now, every build will be public and will also share the changelogs with all of you. I will try to make a new build available every other Tuesday. So stay tuned.
Join the beta club
You can also join the beta club? What’s that and how it works? It’s a magic Telegram group where we can share ideas and thoughts about the product. If you have found a bug or have a suggestion and want to talk about it, this is the place. I also give more details of releases there.
Because of regionalization I’m now with two groups on Telegram (Brazil and Global). I’m also on UWP Community on Discord.
Livestream
Another way to help is to participate on the livestreaming on Twitch, this time I reserve to make changes to the design. This way we can work together and listen to feedback at real time. This is the schedule for the livestreaming:
- Every Tuesday – 22h (10pm) to 23:30 (11:30pm)
- Every Thursday- 22h (10pm) to 23:30 (11:30pm)
- Every Friday- 22h (10pm) to 23:30 (11:30pm)
- It may be possible to stream another day besides this schedule, so follow me there and on Twitter where I announce it.
This schedule may vary depending on my personal schedule, but I will try to steak to it and will let you know on my Twitter (@vt_norton), so follow me there.
Help to code
As I announced early this year, Formula has now three open source projects, that you can contribute at any time. Bonus: any contribution will give you a key to use Formula.
This is the projects on GitHub:
This is the news that I wanted to share with all of you today, hope you like it and I hope you can help me with this quest. Is it asking for too much for you to help spread the news? Thanks in advance.
Now, go do something good.