this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
1193 points (97.8% liked)

Open Source

31031 readers
868 users here now

All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!

Useful Links

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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....

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

I mean, yes, it's a little more effort, but I think you're over playing how much effort is required. Writing a half decent readme is vastly easier than frankly any feature or bug fix. Taking a couple of notable screenshots is super easy. Writing docs is hard (I've written tons for large and complicated projects), but readmes are the easiest and including screenshots is really quite easy.

Everywhere supports markdown in readmes now. Literally everywhere I've ever hosted code. And markdown with links to images is perfectly fine even if viewed in plain text mode. They'll just click the link and view the image standalone. I've done that plenty of times, too. Every editor (plus in-browser code hosts in plain text mode) makes it easy.