We’ve recently updated the Adafruit Learning System with a new look and new features that you’ll start seeing over time. The goal of this new design was to clean up the user interface so that it’s less cluttered, faster and easier to read.

One of the most notable features we’ve added is our new search. We’ve implemented an instant search that updates the results as you go. We have some more changes to make to it yet, but it’s already much better than what we’ve had in the past. We’re hoping it will help you find what you’re looking for faster than ever.

Within the guides themselves, we’ve updated our images a bit. There is now a hover icon to indicate that you can expand the images and view other larger sizes. Images can now also have image captions if the authors of the guides want to add them. This should help authors out if they need to describe an image in further detail.

Buried a little within the My Account settings is the ability to set your default page view type. You can now choose to view all guides in a single page as the default, if that’s something you’d prefer. We don’t want to activate this by default for everyone, as some of our guides are quite long with a lot of media content that would be taxing on something like a Raspberry Pi. If your computer is up to it, it may be just the thing to help you speed through your projects.

There are also two new widgets within the editor that will authors can now use. We’ve added support for Markdown for those that prefer writing in Markdown, or copying their Markdown from GitHub. We’ve also added the ability to add products inline within the guides. Some projects can’t be completed without specific products, so this will help authors point out exactly what is needed for a specific step to be completed in a guide.

Beyond that, we’ve improved the performance in many subtle ways. The home page should load quite a bit faster, especially on slower connections. We’ve also reduced the size of images based on what device you’re using. This will help if you’re on a mobile device quite a bit.

All of those features should be noticeable or start showing up over time, but we’ve also added quite a few fixes that may not be as obvious. Our goal is to continue iterating on the Learning System and keep it at the top of it’s class for makers, hackers, and everyone out there.