At Solitude, we like our open source software. There are all kinds of interesting ideas out there that people are giving away for free. The problem is the websites are almost always shit. Now, I’m not knocking the visual look; it probably doesn’t matter that the website for most programs isn’t attractive.

The main issue, illustrated by almost every open source project I’ve ever seen, is that they assume the user knows what the project is about. Wrong. I usually find out about these things through a vague link. Putting the news section immediately on the front page is a bad thing. The first thing I want to know is exactly what the project is about, not that version 0.65c has just been released with new enhancement X.

Three guidelines:

1. Have a section on your website explaining in plain English, no marketing jargon and as little technical gibberish as is necessary (which should itself be explained), exactly what the project is for, what it does and why anyone should care.
2. Begin the front page with a careful, one-line abstract of the explanation page followed by a “read more” link. If you can’t construct such an abstract, you’ve already got a problem with the structure of the project.
3. Clear, single-click downloads. Note that Sourceforge pages put most people off.

These guidelines will improve your site greatly and are not hard. We’d name names of projects who don’t live up to expectations, but I’m sure that it would take far too long.

Yesterday, I read about Tabtastic (via Jack) and was a little impressed by how simple it is. Follow a simple naming convention and data structure on your page and you can have a javascript-implemented tab pane effect on your site. It looks good, and the html is reasonably semantic (if that is your thing.)

The problem, however, is with usability. When you click on a tab, you change the anchor position of the page (the url fragment beginning “#”). This kicks off whatever logic is required to ensure the correct information is showing for that page. It also scrolls the tab bar off the screen, completely breaking the illusion of having a tab pane. A change of tabs should only change the content, not the window position.

A small matter, but one that immediately hinders the usability of the system.

A question: if you had a tool which did what you wanted, had a decent interface, some nice features but only worked 95% of the time, would you keep it? That 5% is probably not that much unless it happens to be a tool that you use frequently and for long periods, then the 5% really starts to matter.

Macromedia Dreamweaver is that tool. For years now, I’ve been using it (in code viw) to build websites, write PHP and manage web based projects. In the last year or two though, the problems have been mounting up:

• Huge amount of time to create a new site folder and associated data. It should not take minutes to open up a dialog. A minor nuisance, since new sites are relatively infrequent.
• Partial function colouring in PHP. Some standard functions get the function call colouring (blue), others don’t. More than once this has made me second guess the function name.
• Making .htaccess files incredibly difficult to open. It’s just a text file, it should not be that hard.
• Munging data. Because of some angle bracket handling code that has gone horribly wrong, Dreamweaver occassionally changes my data without telling me. What do I mean? Removing the “less than” character from a conditional, for example, or taking chunks of what it believes to be XML away. Unforgivable.

In those same years, I’ve learned to be far less tolerant of problems with tools because I can generally be certain that the problem is not with me. I’ve also become fairly proficient with emacs, and my set-up suits me down the ground. I’m constantly impressed by new extensions tht I find, the commands have become second nature and the minimal interface works. Goodbye Dreamweaver, you should’ve worked 5% harder.

While checking for information on bus timetables yesterday, Arriva (the main operator in my area) astounded me with some piss poor design.

The left hand-side of their page features a form that allows you to input a town and route number to find information on it. Great. Except that upon submitting the form it doesn’t just send your information to a page in which results will be returned, or redirect you to the appropriate information. Oh no, that would be far too simple.

Instead, it executes a javascript function using the long since deprecated javascript: protocol (you do have JS turned on for something as simple as this, right?), pops-up a small window which does nothing but cause a redirect in your original window and then closes, and then takes you to a results page. Javascript and pop-ups for a redirect? What? Don’t get me started on the crufty URLs either.

My final year project is now complete (expect more on that at some stage), celebrating has been done thrice (just another two more to go), pictures were taken (of the CompSoc Easter celebrations at Cafe West), sleep has been caught up on, work has begun on the first project of the holidays, and it feels like a huge burden has been lifted. I’m not the kind of person to get stressed or panic, but it feels very good to no longer have such a constant and heavy workload.

Enough of this self indulgent tripe. Real posts begin again this week.