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If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.
At least with ffmpeg, for 99% of use cases you can just google "how do I do X with ffmpeg" and get a copypasta command line. Whereas with complicated GUI tools, you have to watch a video to learn how to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Handbrake's UI is in the uncanny valley for me -- too complicated for use by laymen, and way too limiting for use by people who know what they're doing...
ffmpeg with disposable or llm backed dnd interfaces. for certain types of tooling UIs should be cheap, disposable and task/worlflow specific.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> contributors of free software tend to be power users or, simply put, nerds it takes both a different background, approach and skillset to design ux and interface if anything FOSS should figure out how to attract skilled artists so majority of designs and logos doesn't look so blatantly amateurish.
My guess is that, as has always been, the pool of people willing to code for free on their own time because it's fun is just much larger than the people willing to make icons for software projects on their own time because they think it's fun.
Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…
Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) In dev work, the complexity is obvious, and that makes it easy for outsiders to understand— they look at the code we’re writing and say “wow you can read that?!” I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. With…
Not 5 minutes after that someone else on the comments went on a weird rant about how allegedly Inkscape and all FOSS was "communist" and "sucked" and capitalist propietary stuff was "superior".
Dunno why people assume that FOSS developers are just dummies lacking insight but otherwise champing at the bit to provide the same refinement and same customer service experience as the "open source" projects that are really just loss leaders of some commercial entity.
Good article, but the reasoning is wrong. It isn't easy to make a simple interface in the same way that Pascal apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a shorter one. Implementing the UI for one exact use case is not much trouble, but figuring out what that use case is difficult. And defending that use case from the line of people who want "that + this little extra thing", or the "I j…
Good points, but to add to the sources of instability ... a first time user of a piece of software may be very appreciative of its simplicity and "intuitiveness". However, if it is a tool that they spend a lot of time with and is connected to a potentially complex workflow, it won't be long before even they are asking for "this little extra thing". It is hard to overestimate the difference between creating tools for…
The casual user just wants a tool to crop screenshots and maybe draw simple shapes/lines/arrows. But once they do that they start to think of more advanced things and the simple tool starts to be seen as limiting.