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Freshmeat II
linuxlover wrote in to note that Scoop has redesigned Freshmeat, so called Freshmeat II features a ridiculous number of new features, and a super clean design. Congrats scoop, and ignore the flamerz this time around. Those who can, create. Those who can't, bitch.
I like the new layout. I very much like his increased standards support, though I could wish he'd gone all the way. A quick run through Tidy corrected all the errors (less than 50; a respectably low number) and had no effect on the layout other than to change the width of the columns slightly (the same situation in both Netscape and IE), so the amount of work to make the HTML fully valid would be minimal at best (mostly just inserting tags at certain places, and making the one quick tweak in the CSS to get the columns back to normal).
But the site is much improved, regardless. I could wish Slashcode would do the same with its standards support (a run through Tidy corrected some 450 errors, generated CSS that even Netscape interpreted beautifully, and the only change made in the layout was the indentation on the lists in Slashboxes, again easily changed in the CSS).
However, all the same, keep up the good work! The sites are looking better all the time, and the functionality is improving too. And for the record, I was one of the (apparently few) people who liked the old layout and wrote in a letter of support. But I like this layout too.
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This Is Not A Flame. That being said . . .
I don't like the new design. And it's not just the selection boxes.
The first time freshmeat was redesigned, there was a long "WTF?!" moment caused both by the unfamiliarity and by the way some things were in places that just didn't make sense.
But over all, it was clear that a lot of time and effort went into the visual design, and it worked out quite well once the functional problems were fixed. Even if it did take forever to render all those boxes.
This time, I can understand why he got rid of the boxes, but he seems to have forgotten what they were for. The last time it was re-worked, it was easier to browse than the original layout. This time, it's harder to browse than the original layout.
And for some very specific reasons.
The boxes were good because they visually grouped everything belonging to a particular item. There is no longer a visual grouping.
Try this - grab the scroll bar with your mouse, close your eyes, scroll up and down a few times until you're sure you're not where you used to be in the page, then glance at the page for a fraction of a second and close your eyes again - Can you remember how many items there were on the screen? Probably not. With the old design, you could have, because the boxes made it very clear, without having to pay attention to detail and repetition of a pattern, what belonged to what.
The black text in the titles right above the light blue text in the by-line is a big mistake. The blue text is more eye-catching, and takes your attention away from the important information: the project you were looking for.
The blue bar on the side is superfluous, but that's just a matter of personal preference.
The selection boxes are inexcusable, even if he's already apologized and promised to take them away. If you add more clicks to a process than there were before, you will invariably annoy your users. This should have been totally obvious, but clearly it wasn't.
The grey bar on the right isn't differentiated enough from the center, which makes the page harder to read. The text is far too close together, it's distracting.
It can be fixed. I understand that the big deal was the back-end. But I *really hope the front end does get fixed.
This is just like television, only you can see much further.
1. the whole page is a table (minus the ad of course) this is very very noticeable slow, and unpleasant.
2. the blue bar on the left runs down the entire page, significantly impacting the amount of space to display content. and yet it adds VERY little to the page, just a few links, and a search box near the very top of the page. this is very poor use of space.
3. the gray bar on the right is hard to read, not hard to read if i sit there and look at it, but hard to read if i'm trying to skim a list of 100 newly added applications in 30 seconds, which is, in truth, what people do.
4. information is not clearly divided. its hard to visually breakup the new entries in the center column the yellow circle is supposed to help i assume (as it doesn't add any other functionality and is repeated over and over and over) and yet it also fails to convey any info. (its a meaningless icon)
5. similar problems in the right hand bar, no clear separation of days, if i'm scrolling down the page, Monday blurs into Sunday blurs into Saturday.
6. Some people have pointed out the similarity with k5. K5's interface is overwhelming, but I was willing to deal w/ that, adjust, spend the time learning it, because there is an amazing amount of interaction going on at k5. this is not the case w/ freshmeat. I know its fun to work on community features, but I really don't see how they improve freshmeat all that much. (Especially if they come at the expense of the old feature set was immensely popular)
7. doing another quick once other or the site, i can't emphasize enough how hard that center column is to use. what was wrong w/ the old boxes? they were cool and usable! ditto in the actual project detail, all the information because a jumbled mess. (and that damn meaningless icon shows up again)
8. don't do it. do we need another community site? if you want to work on a community site, work on the bender code, or scoop, or squishdot. instant messaging in scoop would be an awesome addition, especially if it could optionally get logged somewhere like your diary. that way we could take a lot of the more vitriol debates "offline".
9. i'm going to take a leap of faith and assume that when i click on the totally uninformative "Step 2" button, I'll be brought to a page where I can preview this comment?
thanks, kellan
Nothing personal, but as much as I'm sure that /. looked revolutionary back when it was first designed, it now manages to look clunky and outdated compared to modern sites like kuro5hin. There's just too much in the way of solid blocks of particularly tasteless colours, and the HTML needs to lose the way that everything sits within a single table, making the page so slow to load...
Come on Taco, when you change /. over to Bender are we going to see a site redesign to make it cleaner and more modern looking? It's a real change to give /. a much needed overhaul...