Freshmeat 3.0 Screen Cap

Freshmeat.net has updated its site after many years of stagnation. It is such a shame because they were very well positioned to have really good marketshare any they mostly sat on their laurels. For example they should have been on top of the code search business. Maybe they will take over the extension/addon business from dysfunctional services like Addons Mozilla Org (AMO) [shakes fist]. AMO is a very well designed site/service with a crappy moderation process behind it (and I have personal experience).

The old design was an example of good design at the time with a not overcrowded feeling and convenient but mellow quick link icons. I In any case, my biggest dislike with the old site was the search. It may have been ok in a pre-Google world but if you cannot beat Googles search you need to embed it.

Freshmeat 3.0 Design Close-up

In this new design the listings are nice and compact. Textual buttons appear on mouse over to remove some clutter (I kind of liked the icons as opposed to text for repetition). Unfortunately they have removed a quick way to visit the homepage or full change log. They replaced some of the info effectively with a more modern tag construct but other info is missing. The search is much better but the language of a listing does not display in the results. The language was pretty important to me when browsing for a library. I have not seen if there is a good set of syntax for the search. Google codesearch like lang:c license:MIT syntax would be nice.