As promised in my last post, I’ve now uploaded the latest version of Calcatraz to the live site. The main feature is a new, hopefully more intuitive and consistent user interface. There are also a number of behind the scenes improvements such as general code tidy-ups. One improvement I’m particularly happy with is the integration of javascript and CSS minification into my build process. What this means is that whenever I prepare a new version of the calculator to be uploaded, a bit of code runs automatically reducing the size of my javascript and CSS files. As a result, load times should be slightly reduced as there is now less to be downloaded (which will hopefully further help with the bounce rate). It’s not going to have a huge impact on speed, but by constantly exploiting such opportunities for optimisation the result should be an overall leaner and quicker calculator. If you’re interested in learning more about minification, then check out YUI Compressor from Yahoo! which is the tool I use to perform the minification, and which performs simply and effectively.

I’ll be doing some further refinements on the user interface in the near future to further improve it and in particular clean up the history tab which I’m still not entirely happy with. But I wanted to get the new interface up now to see how well it is received and to identify any sticking points.

You can check out the new interface in action on the main site: www.calcatraz.com.