A directory, by its definition, is an ordering of items that exists to aid people in finding those items. This is not such a thing. This is more of a note pad. Perhaps you should call it the Open Web Tools Doodle? :)

It confounds me that, for example, I have no way of knowing what all these tools are simply by their logos. I have to hover on each one to see what the name, then click it to see what it does, then click elsewhere on the page to escape out. (How about at least an “escape” key to lose the lightbox?)

Imagine a phone book where you had to look at each and every name to see if that was the person you were trying to find, rather than knowing you could look up something alphabetically.

Worse yet: if I visit a project homepage, then hit the back button to go back to the “space”, everything is in a new place. I have no idea which items I’ve already looked at and which ones I haven’t, and need to start over. A huge waste of time.

I like the UI experiments, but it has taken a useful tool and turned it into an unnavigable demonstration of “Wheee! Look what I can do!” Hopefully future iterations will find a way to improve on these aspects, and maybe do away with it altogether for this particular use case.

It would be great to see it emulate a heat map more, so similar tools are grouped together and their size is relative to the amount of attention they get…

Were is the accessible version at least?