I beg you, if you are a developer of an open source app or program - add screenshots of your app to the README file. When looking for the perfect app, I had to install dozens of them just to see what the user interface looked like and whether it suits me. This will allow users to decide if the app they choose will suit them… Please, don’t think about it, just do it…
Dear open source app user: feel free to improve the README file of the projects you come across by adding a few screenshots you believe are relevant.
As both user and developer - user CAN contribute but the developer/maintainer SHOULD add the screenshots.
If the app sucks, few people will add the screenshots. Therefore, most apps without screenshots will suck. So new apps will need the developer to add screenshots, or people will assume it sucks.
And we’re back to square one. The developer has extra responsibility to highlight the features.
Although I understand the OP’s perspective open-source is a community effort and people should have a more proactive attitude and contribute when they feel things aren’t okay. Most open-source developers aren’t focused / don’t have time for how things look (or at least not on the beginning). If you’re a regular user and you can spend an hour taking a bunch of screenshots and improving a readme you’ll be making more for the future the project that you might think.
When the last big Twitter migration to Mastodon occurred there were a lot new users complaining about things like documentation, bugs, etc. Old users and FLOSS supporters kept pushing the “its open source, write a doc or fill out a bug ticket” and evem included documentation on how to do those tasks.
Most people just continued to complain. /facepalm
We just don’t live in a world where making the changes you want are encouraged. We have been thought to just accept whatever changes happen or at most file a suggestion that almost noone will listen to. Obviously open source is different but it’s still such a tiny minority compared to how the rest of the world functions
Sometimes I’d settled for a simple description of what the tool even is. Sometimes the readme is just straight into compilation steps and I feel like we’re rushing into something.
While we’re at it, I love that you let me customize the settings via a config, but for the love of god make the default config the best it can possibly be
This. It should be the most sane configuration and fit most use cases and lead to an experience working out of the box.
I contribute to OS projects and work on one full time. EVERYBODY thinks that their obscure use case is the most common (not saying this is what you are doing).
We get users that are completely flabbergasted that our software doesn’t offer some feature that is totally specific to their industry and has never been requested even once by anyone else previously. We’ll show them our feature request form on our site where you can also view and upvote other requests, and point out that the feature they want has never been requested. They will literally come up with some bs excuse why that is and then insist that we get on it and build out this custom functionality that they need or else they’re going to slander us on social media.
Your app doesn’t integrate with “didLr”? OMG any decent app integrates with “didLr”!
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Grnrrth is a FOSS native qualitivate built with the Jot framework. It comfortably handles 2NUT, xrr, .gif, and any other Banbo hierarchies in a windowed, cross-system integrated module.
And that’s what having a stroke sounds like
There’s an awful lot of comments in this post from people complaining that developers aren’t making their projects attractive and user friendly enough, or the READMEs descriptive enough.
Can I just say, as a developer with some open source projects on github, I don’t care; you’re not my intended audience.
Me, developing a headless component library:
To be that dick, a headless component library is still meant to do something, show an example of it being used!
