Meh. The term 'Project' embodies much much more than just 'code'. A Project is made of its many components: team, community, bug trackers, documentation, resources, news feed and code (I've certainly omitted several other things).
Only after looking at these elements can you get a picture of the project which will tell you a lot about it. How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handling? Etc.
OSS suffers a lot from people who think they can just paste the code, change the implementation when they feel like it, etc.
"How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handling? Etc."
This can't be stressed enough. A prospective user first-and-foremost wants to have an answer to the question "Is this piece of software worthy of my time?". If it fails to answer this question quickly, it will lose the user.
We are used to seeing this kind of ignorance from corporations: "Let's dump this piece of code online. A community will form and users will come by the millions." How many times has this worked?
Right now there are loads of interesting projects on github. Projects that will never be sucessful because they failed to do the extra effort required to "market" them.
1) At the top of the sidebar, there's an "Activity" label with a little cellphone-reception-style indicator icon. Clicking on it shows you a list of checkins, bug updates, and wiki modifications.
2) It's up to the project to show usage examples. Given that Google Code projects have a wiki page as the first thing you see, the examples can be in an even more prominent place than on GitHub.
3) Yeah, there's an extra click and some manual text selection here.
I don't know. I think it strikes a decent balance between letting developers get to the information they want and not scaring off non-technical users.
Comments
Meh. The term 'Project' embodies much much more than just 'code'. A Project is made of its many components: team, community, bug trackers, documentation, resources, news feed and code (I've certainly omitted several other things).
Only after looking at these elements can you get a picture of the project which will tell you a lot about it. How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handling? Etc.
OSS suffers a lot from people who think they can just paste the code, change the implementation when they feel like it, etc.
"How is the support? Do developers even care? Are they serious at issues handling? Etc."
This can't be stressed enough. A prospective user first-and-foremost wants to have an answer to the question "Is this piece of software worthy of my time?". If it fails to answer this question quickly, it will lose the user.
We are used to seeing this kind of ignorance from corporations: "Let's dump this piece of code online. A community will form and users will come by the millions." How many times has this worked?
Right now there are loads of interesting projects on github. Projects that will never be sucessful because they failed to do the extra effort required to "market" them.
Thanks, that brings up another Google Code ui failure.
The front page of a Google Project gives you no indication if the project is being maintained.
When I go to a project on Github this is my flow:
1) When was the last check in? 18 months ago? Pass. Recent? Yes, please.
2) Usage examples? No? Maybe if I really need you. Yes? I'll at least give you shot.
3) Copy git url to the clipboard and then clone it.
Google Code doesn't do a good job of any of these!
1) At the top of the sidebar, there's an "Activity" label with a little cellphone-reception-style indicator icon. Clicking on it shows you a list of checkins, bug updates, and wiki modifications.
2) It's up to the project to show usage examples. Given that Google Code projects have a wiki page as the first thing you see, the examples can be in an even more prominent place than on GitHub.
3) Yeah, there's an extra click and some manual text selection here.
I don't know. I think it strikes a decent balance between letting developers get to the information they want and not scaring off non-technical users.