In an attempt to make the website more useful to macTALK members after a disappointing launch, several improvements are being made. This is an ongoing process for a few weeks from October until the end of November, and possibly into December. Several improvements and bug-fixes across the whole site...

• Improvements to the navigation system on each page with introduction of expandable menus on right, and removal of the navigation 'bubbles' from foot of page in order to remove the depth limitations and give more room to content. This is in response to requests by one or two members for whom these resrictions detracted from the ability to use the website MESSAGES and ARCHIVES features comfortably.

• All forms throughout site and message display pages have been given more depth in order to make viewing and writing easier

• Bug fixed on NOTICEBOARD page where past events were 'recycling' next year. Now expired notices are automatically deleted at the end of the month

• Some content rewritten to reflect changes

• Whole site given same 'look-and-feel' with sitewide adoption of one colour scheme, and scrapping of the 'macTALK CENTRAL' and 'macTALK EXCHANGE' sections. Now all sections navigable as a whole.

• Changes made to many graphic elements, animations and buttons

• The site now optimised for Safari (with tabs but without status bar), a screen resolution of 1024 x 786 (based on 15" LCD Apple Studio Display, and MacOSX. M$ Internet Explorer almost totally ignored in the making of this website! Whilst it is hoped that other popular Mac browsers will display macTALK correctly, there are known to be certain issues with some of the new and upcoming browsers such as Firefox, which hopefully are being ironed out by the developers all the time. At this point, Safari is definitely the recommended browser.

• Login details and timestamp moved and made clearer on each page. (Firefox issue: does not display for some unknown reason).

• Referral advertisements removed throughout. Only some of most useful ones will now remain to continue to give members the opportunity to help support development of the website.

• Bug fixed whereby keywords searched for in the MESSAGES and ARCHIVES corrupted the search if they were found inside a URL.

• Bug fixed whereby some extended text characters were not being found in searches, and/or were not being displayed correctly (for example: '£' pound signs; accented characters; quotation marks; ampersands; chevrons; and so on).

• Improvements and bug fixes made to the complex archive search pages whereby messages can be searched for by DATE, AUTHOR, SUBJECT, THREAD and TEXT criteria. These searches can be further refined by additional keyword in a second field, and by one of several date patterns. Again, the results are displayed in deeper windows. The results of searches by thread can also be emailed to the user for viewing at leisure offline!

• Certain members' real names inserted into the archives to replace their email addresses and to help protect their security.

Still working on...

Many pages are still "under construction" and several NEW PAGES AND FEATURES are being added (news of those later)! Improvements are planned on most interactive sections, giving the user more control over content and, for instance, their own CLASSIFIED ADS. More SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS are also planned.