Mozilla says there’s no central index for tools built to help web developers do their jobs (and/or hobby projects) better, so it set out to build one of its own. Located at tools.mozilla.com and dubbed the Open Web Tools Directory, the organization is taking a swing at building the most extensive and comprehensible index of tools that modern-day web developers can use.
The first thing you’ll notice when you visit the website is the unorthodox – and relatively confusing – design, as you can tell from the screenshot above.
Explains Ben Galbraith on behalf of the Developer Tools team on the Mozilla Labs blog:
We went with a “space” theme to emphasize the sheer size of the tool ecosystem (though at the moment we only have a small fraction of the tools available listed). And, frankly, we just couldn’t do another table-based master/detail database application; we wanted a directory that would be fun to use (and perhaps a bit of fun to create as well).
Luckily, there’s a search box at the bottom that allows you to browser for applications based on its name and category (Design, Code, Debug, Test, Deploy and Docs) which seems to do a decent job at weeding out the right applications from the directory.
Note that you need the most recent browser versions (Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome 2, or Opera 9) to explore the site, but I take it our readers will probably have at least one of those installed already anyway.
According to Mozilla, this is just the first step, and for now it’s inviting developers to submit tools for inclusion in the database themselves. The Mozilla team will review incoming entries and put them up asap. On the roadmap: social features and fresh display options.
(Hat tip to MoMB)
Doing this visually based is fine for about three days, but then it will just become one big cluster f*ck. So unlike Mozilla. Anyway, my suggestion is to make it incredibly simple by presenting it as a tag cloud. Go2Web20.net has done both was decent execution.
Three days? More like 3 Minutes. I have A.D.D. and when I see visual organization done like that, I lose. Form is great, function is awful.
Perhaps a categorised aproach somewhat like browsegoods.com (toy department shows the category use well)
ps: anyone seen other places(ie not corporate) that have an interface like this one? (sorry for linking to commercial site)
Thanks
good try,hope it can perform well on bad condition network.
tough job…
And I am not even mentioning maintaining the directory up to date.
I’m sure this will become overwhelming to maintain, I picture the scene in the Matrix in the white room with endless rows….
Very tough job and quite long term but it will benefit any one who works with the web, I’m sure bloggers want to see this happen.
http://www.youtechno.info
@Catapult – Hmm, yes…because tag clouds are never a cluster f*ck. Looking at the example you presented shows the images arranged in a grid, with tags in an accordion. Neither of which is a cloud.
This is great! Will Microsoft follow suit and create a similar repository for Internet Explorer? We all know how easy it is to debug IE.
Difficult for me to see the categorizations…I suppose one who’s ALREADY familiar with all the icons might find it useful, but I’d find more useful a simple categorized text list of item names and terse descriptions.
For those who prefer order:
http://tools.mo...com/simple.html
it is useful a simple categorized text list
@ MikeH I was just giving an alternative example. Any type of category (hierarchy) would be really nice.
O.k. http://tools.mo...com/simple.html is much, much better. TY!
i very like create web site for example you ,about subject it and web 2.0 peer to peer working for do
thank yous
by:peyvand taghvaei
Mozilla Open Directory Project
Sounds familiar…
It is so slow it makes my notebook crawls, whats the point of having the fancy interface if it requires a space ship fuel engine to make it move!????