331–340 of 641 posts
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Proposing a CLI command as a candidate for "simplest UI ever" is a great gag.
Come on. "type ffmpeg, then hyphen i then the input filename then the output filename". I would've understood this when I was 8. Because I was super smart? No, because I was making a genuine effort.
A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to. My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows. She hated it and begged for us to get a dedica…
Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability. It's…
Totally agree. My first distro was Elementary because it was sold to me as Mac-like. It’s…sort of that, but it was enough for me to stick with it and now I’ve tried 3 other distros! Elementary is still in place in my n150 server. Bazzite for my big gaming machine. Messed with Mint briefly, wasn’t for me but I appreciated what it was.
Familiarity is so important.
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I have been beating this drum for many years. There are some big cultural rifts and workflow difficulties. Unless FOSS products are run by project managers rather than either developers or designers, it’s a tough nut. Last I looked, gimp has been really tackling this effort more aggressively than most.
I am not convinced bad UI is either a FOSS issue, or solved by having project managers. I know very non-tech people who struggle with Windows 11, for example. I do not like MS Office on the rare occasions I have used it on other people's machines. Not that impressed by the way most browser UIs are going either.
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In the 90s I did a tech writing gig documenting some custom software a company had built for them by one of the big consultancy agencies. It was a bit of a nightmare as the functionality was arranged in a way that reflected the underlying architecture of the program rather than the users’ workflows. Although I suppose if they’d written the software well, I wouldn’t have had as many billable hours writing documentatio…
> reflected the underlying architecture of the program rather than the users’ workflows Is this an inherently bad thing if the software architecture is closely aligned with the problem it solves? Maybe it's the architecture that was bad. Of course there are implementation details the user shouldn't care about and it's only sane to hide those. I'm curious how/why a user workflow would not be obviously composed of arch…
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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…
> I think that can give developers a mistaken impression that other peoples work is far less complex than it is. Not at all. Talented human artists still impress me as doing the same level of deep "wizardry" that programmers are stereotyped with.
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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…
> creating good interfaces (for people that aren’t developers.) This is the part where people get excited about AI. I personally think they're dead wrong on the process, but strongly empathize with that end goal. Giving people the power to make the interfaces they need is the most enduring solution to this issue. We had attempts like HyperCard or Delphi, or Access forms. We still get Excel forms, Google forms etc. Ha…
The usual situation is that the business department hires someone with a modicum of talent or interest in tech, who then uses Access to build an application that automates or helps with some aspect of the department's work. They then leave (in a couple of cases these people were just interns) and the IT department is then called in to fix everything when it inevitably goes wrong. We're faced with a bunch of beginner spaghetti code [0], utterly terrible schema, no documentation, no spec, no structure, and tasked with fixing it urgently. This monster is now business-critical because in the three months it's been running the rest of the department has forgotten how to do the process the old way, and that process is time-critical.
Spinning up a proper project to replace this application isn't feasible in the short term, because there are processes around creating software in the organisation, for very good reasons learned painfully from old mistakes, and there just isn't time to go through that. We have to fix what we can and get it working immediately. And, of course, these fixes cause havoc with the project planning of all our other projects because they're unpredictable, urgent, and high priority. This delays all the other projects and helps to give IT a reputation as taking too long and not delivering on our promised schedules.
So yeah, what appears to be the best solution from a non-IT perspective is a long, long way from the best solution from an IT perspective.
[0] and other messes; in one case the code refused to work unless a field in the application had the author's name in it, for no other reason than vanity, and they'd obfuscated the code that checked for that. Took me a couple of hours to work out wtf they'd done and pull it all out.
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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…
> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.
Maybe handbrake was never meant to be used by people who need the one button solution? That one button solution exists all over the place.
It has nothing to do with free vs not-free
Abstraction needs to happen on a different layer. Because your power users are already dealing with complicated stuff and you don't want to make their lives even harder. I know about 10 people in real life that uses Handbrake. And 10 of them use it to rip Blu-ray discs and store media files on their NAS. It will piss them off if you hide all the codec settings and replace the main screen with a giant "convert to Face…
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I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual, and especially so if you’re coming back to a task you haven’t done in a while. With CLI I constantly have to google or ask an LLM about commands I’ve done many times, whereas with a gui if I do it once I can more easily find my way the next time. Anyway both have their place
> I think GUI tools lend themselves more to being able to discover functionality intuitively without needing to look anything up or read a manual Well, there are different issues. Reading a manual is the best you can do, theoretically. But Linux CLI tools have terrible manuals. I read over the ssh man page multiple times looking for functionality that was available. But the man page failed to make that clear. I had t…