All Change!

I have been working full-time on mindat.org since late 2013 (thanks to the generous donations for many of you), for the last six months I have dedicated my time to building a new version of the mindat.org site - including the first major home page redesign since 2006! But that's just a tiny part of what's changed.

Let's go through some of the details:

(Please note that inevitably some things are going to go wrong with the new site. Please be patient and report any problems in the message board or to jolyon@mindat.org)

Support for Mobile devices

Now, on most mindat pages, if you open it up on a tablet or a cellphone you get a version formatted for your screen.

Simplified search

The small search box on the search bar at the top gives instant searching for any mineral, locality or glossary page. If you want the old search form it's still here, just click the 'Advanced Search' button.

Cleaner mineral & locality pages

I've made these pages cleaner, and we now have up to four 'head' photos to better show the mineral or locality in question. If you see pages with several photos of very similar specimens please report this in the forum so we can adjust them - the automatic picks are not always best and we can override them.

Better polytype handling

Information on polytypes is now shown in tabular format on the parent mineral page, for example see pyrrhotite.

Nicer message board format

We have a nicer template for the messageboard, again it's designed to work on mobile and tablet devices better. And an easy link to recent messages.

Mineral photo gallery

There's a new type of photo gallery for showing photos of minerals - an automated gallery

For example here is the gallery for magnetite - http://www.mindat.org/gm/2538

Media Explorer

The photo viewer has been replaced by a new multipurpose media explorer tool.

Click on any photo and you will be able to zoom in/out using your mouse scrollwheel (or by two-finger pinch and zoom on a touch device).

If you load a higher-resolution image, you can actually zoom in to see greater detail - higher resolution versions are loaded as you zoom in.

Retina support! If you have a retina (or other high pixel density) display such as the iMac Retina, Macbook Pro Retina, or iPad 3 or higher then the media player will take advantage of it automatically as you zoom in.

The system also supports playback of video and 3d spinning rotations - more on this soon!

It also supports displaying stereoscopic images on a suitable 3D TV or monitor. Again, more information will be published on using this very soon but if you want to experiment, hit the '3' key once you've loaded a stereoscopic picture.

Basic instructions for media explorer

Click on the mindat logo to return to mindat

Use mouse wheel to zoom in/out, drag on image with mouse to scroll.

Press 1 to fit image to screen
Press 2 to fill screen with image
Press 3 to toggle 3D Stereoscopic view (interlaced frames)
Press 4 to switch left and right image in 3D View

Press < to make background darker
Press > to make background lighter

Have fun!