Another googleturd

http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=another_googleturd

Surprise surprise, google release yet another half baked idea, and techies everywhere bend over and demand that the biggest black object in sight be crammed up their orifices so they can ooh and ahh and generally behave like a bunch of desperate teenagers aching for a fisting.

This time it's google code, and I am astounded (though I should be used to this by now) that anyone in their right mind thinks that this is an improvement over anything equivalent that already exists.

Granted, it does have one tiny benefit over sourceforge, which is that you can access its source control and get up to date files. It's far worse than every other project hosting facility there is out there in every other respect (java.net now offers svn, so the svn support is not such a differentiator anymore.)

What's odd about this particular offering is that while google stuff is generally useless and good for eye candy, it's usually reasonably well executed. In this case it seems like they just rounded up a bunch of apache hippie types and let them futz about with this idea just to stop them from damaging anything important.

For a start, there are some rather important features missing that make this repository, at best, a good backup solution and nothing else. There's no file repository, so you'd have to go elsewhere to actually host your releases. In fact, there's no release mechanism or notification support either, so even if you did by some miracle get some morons interested, you have no way of keeping them updated. The list of project users is also what you'd expect an intern to come up with; it's just a list of logins, with no real names or any way of seeing who 'flibbity.gibbet' actually is, or any way of contacting said person.

Even more surprising, there isn't a single innovative feature here. What's so bad about having a nice searchbar at the top of the svn browsers, instead of the skanky faggotarse default apache svn view? Why can't I use google pages to write docs? Why can't it host my documentation for me and make it searchable via googlemagic?

Trying out this pile of worthless gunk reveals even more flaws. Really basic stuff that shows that Google apparently has a severe QA engineer shortage, or thinks that for trivial toys like this, it doesn't matter if it's halfassed. For example, if a project has 'Apache License 2.0' specified, the link doesn't go to the 2.0 license, but to the generic Apache licenses page.

This sloppiness is prevalent throughout the app. For example, all 'home page' type links go to code.google.com, but nothing pointing to the hosting home, code.google.com/hosting. You'd have to go all the way to the top, then drill down to get to the main entry point.

The form validation is also bizarrely crap. On the project creation page, the create project button is disabled unless you have a description and summary > 3 characters. All good and well, but if your project name is just one char, that's fine, the button is enabled. When you submit however, you're told that the project name is too short. What's so evil about having the same validation mechanism for all the fields? Maybe I'm a dimwitted user, but it's not entirely intuitive to me that I MUST specify a summary and description, and that they must each be more than 3 characters long.

Of course, if you're the kind of guy who likes to create dummy projects just to write bile entries about how much google sucks, then just use Safari. You can happily hit enter there and sneak in 2 character summaries if you so wish.

The issue tracker is somewhat interesting, I do like the freeform label support, but of course, for the sake of consistency with the rest of the app, it's useless for any real world projects. There's no way to add custom tags, so you can't for example add tags for your specific versions. This of course means that for every single issues posted, the first comment you'll get back from the developer is 'err, so what version is this again?'

There's also the issue of stupid defaulting in the issue tracker. I can click new issue, then click submit. There's no detection for the default content being specified, so it's very easy to spam a project with a ton of boilerplate issues.

Editing an issue is equally badly done, there's a 'Add a Comment and Make Changes' title, but all that is under it is a 'enter your comments' textfield. Where's the make changes bit? Ah, you click on the textfield, and the rest of the form magically appears! Yet more bad jarring UI.

All in all, an abysmal effort. Shame on you google, but the real blame here is for all the google fanboys who allow them to get away with such tawdry offerings. In any other company, this sort of half assed effort would never be released, and someone would be held accountable if it was. Maybe google developers pride themselves on not being in 'that sort of company', but in their place, I wouldn't feel so smug about being so sloppy.