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Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

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Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#101

Post by savolai »

savolai wrote: post #34
Jedd wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question. Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint. An equally weird trope us UX pract…

Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users

https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source...

Product & framework thinkers: Case studies.

https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#102

Post by skrebbel »

mcraiha wrote: post #27

If someone is wondering who the Aras guy is https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aras/115971315481385360

Nesnausk! He made some pretty sweet demos too (as in demoscene).

Eg https://m.pouet.net/prod.php?which=86463

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#103

Post by phatskat »

savolai wrote: post #101
savolai wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all products the ux direction of which is likely influenced more by corporate power dynamics. Sure, uxers are involved, the real power they have is a different question. Everyone’s got their preferences, quality of ux is by definition subjective. That is what makes these discussions hard. Naming any examples will always have ”nah i don’t like that product” as counterpoint. An equally weird trope us UX pract…

Shameless plug: User Experience Design in Open Source: Inviting the Users https://savolai.net/ux/user-experience-design-in-open-source... Product & framework thinkers: Case studies. https://savolai.net/ux/product-and-framework-thinkers-when-d...

I’m definitely going to read those, but even without doing so “inviting the users” as a concept carries a lot of potential. We were tasked to rewrite a very old windows app for backend grocery store sales in a web/Laravel/Vue application, and product spent _months_ if not longer sitting with sales reps, watching them use the old tool, and asking them what they would want to see - how does it work? Can it be more efficient? What do you dread most when using this?

The end result was a real pleasure both to write and to use.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#104

Post by phatskat »

dfxm12 wrote: post #41
high_na_euv wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teams are decent, wdym? Inb4: I've used ventrilo,team speak, mumble, discord, Skype.

It looks like you only use a tiny fraction of Teams' functionality. I agree, there's little to complain about when using it for IM/voice/video calls. When you start using it for other things, especially the enterprise features, it is bad. It is a resource hog, handles navigation poorly, has poor default settings, finding installed apps can be tough, etc.

> handles navigation poorly

My current pet peeve: I’m often going back to the previous week on Monday to fill out my time sheet. So, I open the chat for a meeting last week to see how long it took, fill it out, and hit the calendar icon in teams and I’m back on the current week. It’s a painful UX flow that I’ve now built in to my brain, so help me god if they fix it.

Note that teams does include a “back” button, and also note that it doesn’t give a flip about state - it knows you were just at the calendar but doesn’t care where, so you’re back on the current week

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#105

Post by hamdouni »

crote wrote: post #82
Kye wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There always seems to be an incompatibility between the people who made it, the people who use it, and the people who want to contribute. The latter two often try, but the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that even if it's not in conflict. It's hard to fault anyone in that triad 100%. Open source has a way of becoming…

> the former isn't interested in the help or has a very specific vision for the project and doesn't allow any input that isn't in line with that I've come to call this "fenceware": technically open source due to its licensing, but community-wise it is as if the developers just throw a ball of code over the fence every few months. Sure, they let you play with it for a bit, but it is not yours to co-own.

Why not if you are free to fork it and do whatever you want with it ?

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#106

Post by bzzzt »

erikbye wrote: post #77
bzzzt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is such a weird trope. No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.

Compared to Microsoft Office suite, Libre suite is definitely not slow.

Depends on your system. A few years ago I ran it on a MacBook where scrolling on an empty page took ages. Seems nobody tried it out on a Mac before releasing the port since it was totally unusable. Hopefully it's fixed now, but I wouldn't recommend a piece of software I don't trust to anyone.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#107

Post by hju22_-3 »

socalgal2 wrote: post #69
crote wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough , it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS softwa…

For Blender I agree. I don't feel like gIMP ever hit that moment. Blender appears to be serious competitor to 3DSMax/Maya/Houdini etc. gIMP does not appear to be a serious competitor to Photoshop even after they shipped v3

Yes, because it isn't. What version they pump out has nothing to do with viability. It still lacks much of the feature set and functionally of Photoshop, enough so that it's just not a valid comparison, let alone a valid alternative. Like, I've seen people comparing Krita as the better alternative to GIMP, which isn't even designed to fill the same need. But the fact that those comparisons have even occurred should tell you enough about the state of GIMP.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#108

Post by user____name »

erikbye wrote: post #77
bzzzt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is such a weird trope. No, it isn't. Lots of non-trivial OSS desktop applications are clearly made by people with no interest in aligning with expected desktop GUI behavior. From Gimp with dozens of windows to LibreOffice which is slow and has bad font rendering. And those are the 'poster apps' for FOSS desktops, lots of apps are worse.

Compared to Microsoft Office suite, Libre suite is definitely not slow.

Last time I tried (admittedly two years ago), it was incredibly sluggish, several times more so than MS Office, which is also sluggish in general.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#109

Post by xboxnolifes »

Jedd wrote: post #19
crote wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough , it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS softwa…

> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

Usually being compared with their non-OOS alternatives, not random enterprise org software.

Re: Netflix Animation Studios Joins the Blender Development Fund as Corporate Patron

#110

Post by bitwize »

Jedd wrote: post #19
crote wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a self-reinforcing loop. Once a FLOSS tool becomes good enough , it'll start to attract professional users, who are willing to invest in it, which makes it even better. And it is quite hard for commercial players to compete with free. But FLOSS software is mainly made by developers. Who like writing new flashy features, but are awful at UX, and making sure all the small kinks are worked out. So most FLOSS softwa…

> but are awful at UX This is such a weird trope. For those of us who've used microsoft teams, jira, servicenow, salesforce, or basically any insanely popular (in the commercial if not upvote sense) products, it's unclear what is being compared to with these tired claims.

Getting good UX requires professional designers, extensive human testing, and knowledge of human psychology—things historically in short supply among the OSS geek set. In the 1980s Apple ran a human factors lab that spent thousands of hours determining which interface features were the easiest to use and most efficient for many common computing tasks. This is why classic Mac OS is still the gold standard for UX. Even Mac OS X started making compromises to accommodate techie trends, rather than keeping the focus on the average user.

Because much proprietary software has garbo UX, that doesn't make the OSS UX situation not garbo.

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