Live data from Hacker News

Ansel

ansel.photos

141–150 of 167 posts

Re: Ansel

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

This is exactly right. If you've written further on this subject, I'd like to read it.

Planning on it. I'm compiling a list of points and counterpoints I've encountered when discussing this over the years and forming it into something informative that has practical actionable advice for everyone involved.

Re: Ansel

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> …successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people. Is GIMP the exception that proves the rule?

Is your point that GIMP is not successful; or that it is successful, despite lacking ux/UI people?

A couple I'm friends with had a broken kitchen faucet handle for ages-- it would just fall off unless you held it on while operating the faucet. Unfortunately, one of the necessary connector pieces was no longer available, so it wasn't a trivial fix. Once, when I was pet sitting their rabbits, I got so annoyed by the thing that I went home and made a wooden piece to fit in where the missing part went, and fixed it while they were still on vacation. It was supposed to be a surprise but I totally forgot about it, and a few months later my wife said to them "hey do you like having your kitchen faucet fixed?" They looked at her, perplexed, walked over to the kitchen faucet, tried to pull it off, and it obviously didn't come off. They were shocked! Why? Because they were so used to holding that damned handle on the faucet that it just became an part of their using that faucet.

Similarly, people get used to bad interfaces. While we are always going to be most productive using interfaces that we're used to, that often mistakenly leads them to believe that they're objectively good. If you ask nearly any group of professional photographers how many hate Adobe, most will raise their hands. Ask them how many have used Gimp, they'll almost all raise their hand. If you ask them how many used Gimp more than once, they'll almost all lower them. Ask them why, and they will almost guaranteed cite the poor interface. While many dedicated and experienced FOSS developers (which I am) will cite Adobe's marketing practices as the reason people use Photoshop instead of Gimp, I call bullshit. You'll find many more photographers using Affinity Photo than Gimp, and considering Gimp is free, that says a lot. Who will you find using Gimp? Developers that need a photo editor. Why? They're so used to holding on the faucet that they don't even recognize when they see a properly working one. (And they'll often get really mad for even implying it needs to be fixed.) You also don't see that split with Inkscape. Most people who professionally work with vector art choose Illustrator as their primary tool, but most of them cite exactly the reasons developers assume people continue to use photoshop: overall smoothness, ecosystem integration, file type compatibility, etc. There are some legitimate shortcomings in Inkscape-- the type tools are just not as good which matters for graphic designers, for example. But lots of people who do vector art professionally do use inkscape.

Re: Ansel

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

> FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers . And here lies the rub. I have tried soliciting help in the past . Most ui UX ppl only want to work on successful projects, but successful projects don't need help from ux/UI people.

A) If you surveyed the same number of developers to contribute to the project and they said no, would you make the same inference about all developers? I think you're assuming more than you realize.

B) The number of successful FOSS projects with interfaces good enough for people who don't have a working mental model of the way software operates is vanishingly small. Firefox... though they actually have a formidable team of designers. Inkscape I'd say. But almost every successful FOSS project caught hold in the technical community, and no further. Sometimes it's barely good enough for that... I mean hell... look at Eclipse. Compare its features on paper to what you get in commercial editors and then see how many developers use it voluntarily.

C) One thing few developers understand about interface design is that adding features here and there to make things better doesn't really work like it does with, say, an API. It involves analysis, talking to people who use the software, coming up with a strategy, and implementing that strategy. Usually that strategy isn't the sort of thing you can implement piecemeal, which is why most significant UI updates today involve making a completely new design, and letting users enable the entire thing as they see fit.

Re: Ansel

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

I don't think i've ever agreed more with someone on here. I'm really not sure if its a case of UX/UI and art people not being willing or not seeing the demand in the FOSS community or FOSS communities to seek out those people to participate but dear god so many good FOSS projects just have horrid UI/UX because the guys doing these projects are great at backend but horrid at frontend, things like amazing AI apps just…

I've thought a lot about this. I think it goes much deeper than people merely not being great at interface work-- I think a lot of FOSS development is a backlash to the sort of development people have to do at work, where they're forced to reckon with designers that have more say about what the interface looks like than they do. Also, in many instances, these developers tell themselves that they are making great interfaces but they're just a little bit ugly, and people need to read the docs and get over it. Most computer users who use dozens of application every week will never read a single complete paragraph of software documentation in their entire lives. Why? Because they don't have to-- and many of these FOSS applications are doing things a lot simpler than what MS Outlook does.

Also, anybody who's been to art school or mentored junior developers knows that we get most defensive about the things we're least confident in. Unfortunately, that comes out when trying to address UI problems in FOSS projects.

Re: Ansel

#145
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

I agree with you point about UX-professionals. I am not a professional UX designer, but I work in product/graphic/web design since 20 years. As such I volunteered for an open source project once, in a push which (according to the founding developer) was of great value to the project. Basically I just looked at all things as if I had seen them the first time and tried to formulate solutions that replaces gotchas with…

I think that a part of FOSS culture for some developers is a backlash against the things that bother them when coding at work, and a designer having more say over how the interface works than the developer really pisses a lot of people off.

Re: Ansel

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not familiar with the software, but generally, I get why he left to go do his own thing. I've made a few forks of a few projects over the years considering it. I'm perpetually in the process of beating this dead horse, but FOSS would have so so many banging gold-standard user-facing apps if they enlisted the help of experienced UI or maybe UX designers and really worked to make them part of the community. To do t…

> It would be like a team of civil engineers working on a restaurant design scoffing at an architect […] Meanwhile, everyone else that has to interact with that kitchen suffers. > chefandy Name checks out :-)

Been a long time since I worked in restaurants, but it sure sticks with you... for better or worse.

Re: Ansel

#147
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author has a blog post here, https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent... , which exhibits some example code, for example, this: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/blob/darktable-4.... That's a far cry from what I'd find acceptable in any project.

The author is not wrong, the code really is crazy. Here's another random snippet from the ugly rewrite: for(char relative[] = "-2"; (relative[0] ^= '+' ^ '-') == '-' || ++relative[1] This is just pure excess cleverness. It's not even obvious how many times this loop runs for. There's a comment 1000 lines away that says this: #define NUM_INSTANCES 5 // or 3, but change char relative[] = "-2" to "-1" This is just insan…

I had to think about what that loop does for an embarrassingly long time.

I’ve never seen XOR used as an in-place alternation operator like that in a for loop. I’ve only ever seen it used as a swap function not an inline expression.

I’ve also never seen a for loop that uses a mutable string updated char-by-char like that.

It’s just… special.

Re: Ansel

#148
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author has a blog post here, https://ansel.photos/en/news/darktable-dans-le-mur-au-ralent... , which exhibits some example code, for example, this: https://github.com/darktable-org/darktable/blob/darktable-4.... That's a far cry from what I'd find acceptable in any project.

The author is not wrong, the code really is crazy. Here's another random snippet from the ugly rewrite: for(char relative[] = "-2"; (relative[0] ^= '+' ^ '-') == '-' || ++relative[1] This is just pure excess cleverness. It's not even obvious how many times this loop runs for. There's a comment 1000 lines away that says this: #define NUM_INSTANCES 5 // or 3, but change char relative[] = "-2" to "-1" This is just insan…

[flagged]

Re: Ansel

#149
post #97
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, coming from Darktable and trying out Lightroom felt like trying to do good old darkroom work with my hands tied behind my back. Darktable offers a few really powerful, generic tools that you can use in different ways to get different effects – things like equaliser, parametric masks, LAB curves, etc. It makes little sense to use it without reading up on some of those more advanced tools first. Light…

Would you mind giving examples where you use parametric masking? I read the docs* and it is not very clear to me the practical side (I'm a Lightroom user). * https://docs.darktable.org/usermanual/3.8/en/darkroom/maskin...

An example: Camera noise is often particularly annoying in the sky area. So I'll have two denoising filters active: A subtle one that doesn't lose much detail, and a strong one that only applies to the sky. Selecting the sky tends to be easy with a parametric mask: Just select the sky's hue and it's done.

Re: Ansel

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. If you've written further on this subject, I'd like to read it.

Planning on it. I'm compiling a list of points and counterpoints I've encountered when discussing this over the years and forming it into something informative that has practical actionable advice for everyone involved.

Sounds good! Standing by.
Post reply on HN