The GRACE Plotter Pt. 5 – Retiring the original design

The original GRACE Plotter design

New design

Dear friends, this month, we are retiring the original GRACE Plotter design and introducing a brand new one. The original design has made wonders for 10 years, and had remained unchanged since its inception without feeling obsolete, which is an exploit in the fast changing world of web design. However, we are now completely aligning it with the official CNES/GRACE website. This is both for the sake of consistency and functionality. The integration between the raw data and the visualization tools will allow us to make a much better promotion of our gravity solutions. It also adds several new functionalities, including the new dropdown menus, and it now brings visual consistency across all of our websites. The two pages are now perfectly in tune, you can visit the new version here.

Legacy version

That being said, there is still good news for fans out there. As any good old piece of history, it deserves a place in a museum. And so it will. So, for those of you who loved the original design, we will still keep it available as a legacy version. You can visit it here. The data and functionalities will no longer be updated, so it’s really now a piece of archeology. Becoming a piece of archeology is a status in itself. Think about Indiana Jones… The Ark of the Covenant, the Cross of Coronado, the Staff of Ra, the Sankara Stones, the Crystal Skull, the Holy Grail, the Antikythera… Each one has a fascinating story, just like the GRACE Plotter (in our own eyes, of course). And who knows, if some adventurer from the 22nd century uncovers it from the relics of the internet, the original design might have another life one day…

If you haven’t yet read the full story yet, you can read it from the start here: