We release continuously, but some releases have more visible changes than others and I thought it was worth highlighting some of these in the latest version as I think they have really made Chill Code easier to use and understand.
Firstly, we have introduced messages and alerts on the right hand side. More generally, we tidied the screen to make clear that you do your work on the left, and helpful meta stuff resides on the right. In the image below we have a welcome message and alerts highlighting that I haven’t added my AWS credentials (i.e. I can’t deploy) or any GitHub repos (I can’t add source).
You can use these alerts to set credentials outside of the credentials screen as they expand.
The message/alert layout is carried through to the Chill screen. This view of the Chill itself is now much tighter and the tabs have been removed so that your environments are more visible. The reasoning here is that people were making great Chills but never deploying them – so we’ve tried to make the deployment functionality far more visible.
Back on the front page, we’ve added a feature that allows you to create a new Chill from a software package search. In the instance below I’m looking for Node:
And I get a collection of packages back…
I can select one of these and then create a complete Chill from it.
Theoretically you could then deploy straight from here, though you probably want to add content and startup instructions. The goal with this mechanism is to encourage everyone to search for software that they can deploy earlier in the journey of learning about Chill Code. Indeed, we intend to add this to the front page so that anyone that visits get site is tempted to explore and get drawn in.
A brief word on the next release. The code to allow deployment to Google Compute Engine is in place (via the native API’s rather than lib cloud that we use for AWS). We need to bring these features to the front end – so hopefully that will be ready in the next fortnight.
