Dev diary March 2016 - New design and future improvements

A month and a half ago we launched our new design and we are incredibly happy with the result. We have received a lot of positive feedback and everything went surprisingly smooth for such a big update.

Since then we have spent most of our time fixing minor bugs, hunt down performance issues and improve the server infrastructure. We have also spent a lot of time planning and improving a new site feature called Lists.

What is Lists on AlternativeTo?

When we launched the new version we talked about our new and improved start page, and we have spent quite some time on this page since then. We didn’t talk so much about the lists feature back then but it is essentially a feature that lets us create custom lists of apps and share them with our users. We do not see these collections of apps as just simple lists. We want to think of them as “living articles” or “living blog posts”, where we can list a custom selection of apps and write about the reasons for including every single item. To get a better understanding, see some of the examples that are already live on the site like Crew Picks, Privacy and Security enhancing add-ons for Firefox and Recently Discontinued apps.

We will continue to improve this feature and in the future all users of the site will be able to create their own lists. Maybe you would like to create lists like “My iPhone home screen apps”, “Apps I want to try”, “Essentials tools for every web developer”, “My favorite Dropbox alternatives” and so on. Lists will have a lot off different settings to make them look and work the way you want them before you shared them with the world.

Let us know what you want to make lists of and what features you would like to use when creating lists. We will try hard to bring these new ideas to you as soon as possible. Email us, contact us on Twitter or comment below if you have any input.

And hey! We also moved our blog to Ghost :)