Pinderkent

Recently, a new version of the freshmeat.net Web site was made public. For those who may not be aware, it is (or at least was) one of the best software directories out there. Its emphasis on open source software makes it particularly useful. But until this new version, it also presented a very clean interface that was practical to use. Unfortunately, I think we have lost much of this usability with this latest version of the site.

Let's start with one thing the previous design of the Freshmeat site did right. Notice that it uses the entire width of the browser window. This is very useful for those of us with larger monitors or those of us with higher screen resolutions. While we often want to restrict the width of a prose-based Web site to improve readability, as in the case of blog postings and news articles, I don't think it works so well in the case of Freshmeat's new design. Its width is currently 960px, which leaves literally inches of wasted space on even just a 22-inch widescreen monitor at a resolution of 1680x1050.

The image below compares the old design at the top, above the red line, to the new design at the bottom of the image, demonstrating how the old site made more effective use of screen space:

On the old design's main page, along the left side and throughout the center of the page, we get a listing of the most recent software releases. This very quickly tells us the name of the project with the new release, the new release version number or identifier, when the release notice was posted, a summary describing the software, a summary describing the changes, as well as other information like categories the software falls under, its license, and relevant URLs. We get access to a lot of information very quickly. This is something else the new design isn't as effective at doing.

As an example, we can look at the entry for the NorfelloCMMS OS 2.0.0 release, made on November 22, 2007. Under the old design, it looked like:

With the new design it now looks like:

One thing to notice is the different date format. The previous design mentioned the release year, which is absent from the new design. As is shown by this example, it's important to show the year, as we may be looking through the archives at releases several years old.

Another difference is that of the length of the description. This is perhaps the worst aspect of the new design. Notice that with the new design, it's truncated after a couple of lines, with it necessary to click the "more.." link to see the full description. On the other hand, the old design provided the full description. While something can be said for writing short, concise descriptions, sometimes it isn't possible to do that effectively in the mere 200 characters that the new design seems to allocate to project descriptions. A truncated description like that is more awkward to work with than a description that is slightly too long.

Although not visible in the NorfelloCMMS OS 2.0.0 release example, it looks like the change descriptions are truncated as well under the new design. The old design displayed the full changelog, without truncating it and forcing the user to click on a link to see the rest of the changes.

Where available, a screenshot is shown for each release. Unfortunately, on the main page, the screenshot thumbnail is nearly useless. They're just too small to be of any practical value at 90px by 70px. Unfortunately, clicking on the thumbnail brings you to the project page, which has only a slightly larger, but nearly as useless, 133px by 100px image. It takes yet another click on that thumbnail to finally display a larger, somewhat comprehensible, version of the screenshot.

One other useful feature of the old release entries was the hierarchical categories. For example, the NorfelloCMMS OS 2.0.0 entry was listed under "Information Management :: Issue Tracking", "Office/Business" and "Office/Business :: Scheduling" with the old design. With the new design, it's under the single-level "Office/Business", "Information Management" and "Scheduling" tags. I personally found the old hierarchy more organized than the new scheme.

The greater usage of images, in the form of per-release screenshots and gravatars, has also increased the size of a request for the various pages. Although it's not a perfect example because it's an archived version of the page, the November 22, 2007 release listing comes in at a mere 48 KB, according to Firebug. The new listing for that date comes in at 426 KB. Although not a huge deal in these days of widespread broadband Internet access, that does translate to the difference between a site that feels snappy, and a site that feels slow.

The above highlights just a few of the problems I've noticed with the new site. I've tried to give it several days of use, to see if it'll grow on me, but so far it hasn't. Some of the more serious issues, such as the truncation of the descriptions and changelogs, would be relatively easy to fix. Others, such as the new tagging scheme, may be more difficult. And although I probably won't stop using Freshmeat altogether, as it is a valuable resource, its usability has taken a hit for me.