Except that the UI is so bad that you can only discover a few top ranked (whatever it means in this UI) projects or the project you already know it exists in there.
Agree. Over use of animation. All these are good examples.
If Google has 50+ projects, then it's best to just have a page with multiple rows, each row is a category, and upon click can expand down to what #3 looks like. Or perhaps just GitHub README... it's pretty nice to read.
The problem is that we have over 2,000 projects, so simply listing them all on one page doesn't work very well. Hence why we built this directory, which allows browsing by category, by tag, by language, as well as full text search.
Firstly wayyy too much useless animation + distractions. This slows down every aspect of the interface making it annoying to use.
The default of showing just miniature icons of projects provides ZERO useful information. After clicking 'next' and waiting an eternity for the animation to finish, you are presented finally with some information, just a title and description.
In this mode there is no way to know when you've finished seeing all the projects in a category (no clear end).
The no ending is solved by changing the view to the grid based one. But guess what, grids fucking suck for text, they are good for images, we don't scan data grid by grid for sentences, this makes it insanely difficult to read, or skim - ie. read first four words, decide no interest in that particular project, now you have to keep moving your eyes right - which you would normally do if you're INTERESTED and since this is text, you're forced to look over more text from the project which you don't want - in a list view, your eyes go down to the next project, your brain has a clear new context.
And of course nowhere can you see latest commits, total commits, language etc. You know, stuff that matters.
If you can't handle 2,000 projects, how are you going to handle 20,000, or 200,000?
The Debian Project last I checked (a year or two back) had over 60k software packages. It's got an interface for delivering those. Actually, several interfaces, and the ones I prefer and use are commandline and filter through grep, if they don't provide their own search interfaces.
And those are platforms which are noted ... for their relative lack of software availability. (I think that criticism is ... misguided in several ways, but on a sheer quantitative basis, there are some pale merits.)
If Google cannot figure out how to manage, organise, present, and offer useful search interfaces to a measely 2,000 pieces of software, then, with all due respect, get the fuck out of the way for someone who can.
We recently thought about on how to do this as well and created our own Open Source page [1]. Not sure if we have done it right, but I quite like it. Happy to receive some feedback on it. It's nothing huge, nevertheless we're quite proud of what we've achieved.
Thanks. What you said definitely exemplifies the problem we were trying to solve. People often look through one or two of our GitHub organizations, but don't realize that we actually have over 100 of them. Plus many of our projects aren't actually on GitHub (or at least only mirrored to GitHub). The goal of this directory was to help discover those projects.
If Google has 50+ projects, then it's best to just have a page with multiple rows, each row is a category, and upon click can expand down to what #3 looks like. Or perhaps just GitHub README... it's pretty nice to read.
[1]: https://netflix.github.io/ [2]: http://twitter.github.io/ [3]: http://etsy.github.io/