Google code

If you don't already know, I have been working on a little software project, that lets you publish images to Flickr and Picasa. What is different about it is, it works as a plugin in image editing software like Gimp and Inkscape; and now it also works on Nokia's internet tablets. Yesterday I released v0.5 of it.

But this post is not about my project, it's about its hosting site. I have done open source projects before on other hosting sites - xenen on Sourceforge, faint on Maemo garage - but I found their web interfaces very ... awkward. They look pre-historic compared to today's web 2.0 interfaces (Note: this is just about UI, SourceForge deserves lot more credit for what it has achieved beyond UI). So when I came to know about Google code I was extremely happy. When I came to know about it (that was already after 1 year it had lanched), the UI was still very simple. It didn't have all the features SourceForge had. But I had a gut feeling that it will have the finest features in the future to come, only because it is Google.

And I was right. One of the very useful they have recently added is source code browsing. Their previous code browsing was as plain as firefox's file:// browser. But I had a feeling that Google will be putting an extremely well SVN browsing interface that matches their style. And they did. Browse my project's source code here and see it for yourself. The browsing of entire source files, their older revisions and the diffs - everything is just how it should be. It just makes open source project development lot of fun. Thanks to Google code team for this new feature.

I have some good things to say about Google codesearch as well, but I will save it for next post.