News written by Petteri Pyyny (January, 2008)

AfterDawn's main navigation has remained virtually the same for almost a decade now. The familiar split between news, software, guides, etc has been an integral part of our site since the very beginning.

But for many, many years, we've received emails and feedback reports from our users (specially new users) saying that when you first time arrive at AfterDawn, it is really hard to understand what type of content the site has and where it could be found from.

Thus, about a year ago, we began planning a new way to organize the material available on our site. The idea to "tag" or "assign content to topics" has evolved to the new navigation bar you now see on the left-hand side of the page. It should be noted that we wanted to build the new "topic-based" navigation system independent of the main navigation, so that it wouldn't get too complex for new users.

We've went through thousands of articles, glossary entries, software items, etc and tried to assign them into somewhat logical "packages" that should ease finding the material from our site users are looking for.

So, there it is; our new navigation sidebar. If you like it or hate it, please tell us! And if you hate it, tell us why and how we could improve it. You can simply post a comment to this article and tell us here what you think about the new navigation element. If you do truly hate it, click the top part of it (the one marked with X :-) and it should disappear.

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So, the year 2007 is behind now and new year has begun. Once again, it was a year that didn't revolutionize the world of digital multimedia, but rather was a year of strong evolution. The year 2007 was a year when technologies and products that have been hyped for several years, finally started to gain ground and it was also a year that showed significant developments towards inevitable "fusion" of various home entertainment technologies.

But lets start with the year's only true surprise...

iPhone

Being one of the most hyped product of the year (losing only to Facebook...), Apple managed to do the unthinkable and stir the well-established mobile phone market so much that it took all the buzz away from technologically more capable product launches during the year.

iPhone showed the tech specs aren't everything -- the phone itself pales in comparison with virtually any "smart phone" produced by likes of Nokia and Samsung. Despite having sub-par camera, slow data transfer modes (no 3G), lacking some of the very basic phone functions (imagine a phone where you have to send SMS separately to each recipient), iPhone proved that with clever user interface and extremely well-thought user experience can be enough to persuade people to cough up well over $1,400 for a phone.

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