While the new design is better visually, it follows a trend that I've seen the past few years and that I don't particularly like: it dedicates almost all of the real estate trying to convince you that the Khan Academy is great, while downplaying the videos which are the actual content of the site.<p>This is fine for an app or content that is behind a "registerwall", because you must convince the user that registering is worthwhile. But in the Khan Academy the courses a freely available. Instead of presenting me a video of Sal chatting with Bill G on the stage of TED, I'd prefer a video that is likely to expand my understanding of the universe.
JQuery mobile seems like an awesome way to get both iPhone and Android support in one fell swoop.<p>It's still not quite as good as a native app, but it seems like you're getting 90% of the benefit with about 10% of the work. For a dev team strapped for resources it seems like a good option.
I would strongly recommend a black background to go with the blackboard theme of the videos. (Alternatively, switch to whiteboard visuals). It would blend so nicely. Also, the blackboard animation should be in a smooth vector format instead of blurry compressed, bandwidth-intensive videos. Now for words and symbols, I recommend text. You can easily time-release it with JavaScript. For diagrams, maybe something like Graffiti Markup Language.
<a href="http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/about/" rel="nofollow">http://www.graffitimarkuplanguage.com/about/</a>
The design looks very slick, and I'm very impressed.<p>My one complaint is that it seems wrong to have a pseudo-hover state for the entries in the lists. I don't know what standard practice is in mobile web interfaces, but it seems strange that scrolling causes elements to look selected because you have to hit a point in order to start scrolling.
Clickable link: <a href="http://www.khanacademy.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.khanacademy.org/</a><p>I had expected that the image of the redesign would link to the main page, but annoyingly, it does not, nor is there a link anywhere else in the article.
fwiw the khan academy runs on app engine and is open source:<p><a href="https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-developers/getting-started-with-the-code" rel="nofollow">https://sites.google.com/a/khanacademy.org/forge/for-develop...</a><p>pretty easy to keep up with the progress by running it locally and occasionally syncing.<p>one note: on my nexus one, the back button in the upper left of the mobile site doesn't work. specifically, after clicking on one of the list items, sliding to the right, I can't go back by hitting the button on the upper left.