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Free software scares normal people

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#581

Post by jcelerier »

latexr wrote: post #544
f33d5173 wrote: post #190

People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you un…

> or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. That’s not always a possibility. See for example: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iph... Those people didn’t need or want Photoshop or a complicated program with tons of options to convert image formats form anything to anything. Even a simpler app like Preview implies knowing where to…

> They could have done instead with a simple window which said “Drop File Here”, and if it’s an HEIC, convert to JPEG

But then you have to remember the names of 200 distinct software that all do this one thing, so you make a meta-software to manage and organize them, and you're back to square one only with more indirection

Re: Free software scares normal people

#582

Post by angiolillo »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #579
angiolillo wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> FOSS is ~99% developers Projects like GNOME, Elementary, Blender, Krita, KDE Plasma, Penpot, and MuseScore seem to attract contributions from designers. I suspect it's because designers are like any other open source contributor: they want to work on projects that they use themselves and where their contributions will be appreciated.

> attract contributions from designers How many of them are paid? I know MuseScore, Penpot, and Blender have paid for almost all of their design work (because they have paid staff) Not just a relevancy problem, it's much easier to get free development work in OSS than design work. It's a decades-long problem.

Fair point with those three.

I'm still skeptical that it's primarily about pay. I know many designers who do pro-bono design work, just not for FOSS. They typically work on nonprofit websites, community newsletters, contribute game mods/assets, work on civic tech, even band posters.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#583

Post by bccdee »

listenallyall wrote: post #494
marcus_holmes wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is always the response. But it's wildly impractical - there are only so many developer hours available. The budget is limited, so not everyone gets what they want immediately. This should be obvious. Part of the problem is that the novices that create these applications don't consider all the edge cases and gnarly non-golden-path situations, but the experienced devs do. So the novice slaps together somethi…

> wildly impractical - there are only so many developer hours available Which is a huge reason that learning a RAD (rapid application development - emphasis on rapid) tool is a pretty useful skill.

What makes it rapid is taking shortcuts. There's no silver bullet for increasing speed while preserving maintainability and extensibility. Prioritizing speed is exactly the problem described in the post you're responding to.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#584

Post by f33d5173 »

latexr wrote: post #544
f33d5173 wrote: post #190

People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you un…

> or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. That’s not always a possibility. See for example: https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iph... Those people didn’t need or want Photoshop or a complicated program with tons of options to convert image formats form anything to anything. Even a simpler app like Preview implies knowing where to…

> That’s not always a possibility.

The solution in such cases can't reasonably be "everybody around the world learns to download one particular tool to fix things". In your example, the two reasonable solutions are either apple figures out how not to send image files to people that they can't understand, or the college board figures out how to convert heic into jpeg themselves. Otherwise, as in that case, most people will simply be left in a lurch.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#585

Post by m463 »

squeedles wrote: post #10

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…

I think it is like simplified wikipedia. It is possible, but not mainstream enough to get good coverage.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

It would be interesting to have a "simplified linux", or "linux for kids" or similar.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#586

Post by DrewADesign »

eviks wrote: post #372
DrewADesign wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dozens of people I know that design interfaces professionally can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them. You’re assuming that things you think “look designed” were made by designers rather than people playing with the CSS in a template they found trying to make things “look designed.” You’re almost certainly mistaken.

> can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them That's part of the problem, they'll defend their poorly visible choice by lawyering "but this meets the minimal recommended guideline of 2.7.9"

Find a validator and try to make a text color selection that meets wcag guidelines which doesn’t have contrast high enough to read it perfectly easily. The criteria are not ambiguous and they’re not scraping the visibility barrier.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#587

Post by DrewADesign »

pseudalopex wrote: post #543
DrewADesign wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dozens of people I know that design interfaces professionally can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them. You’re assuming that things you think “look designed” were made by designers rather than people playing with the CSS in a template they found trying to make things “look designed.” You’re almost certainly mistaken.

No. I worked with designers who designed low contrast and low density interfaces. I read articles written by designers. I used products of companies like Apple.

Examples? Are they interface designers? Are they qualified? The existence of shitty designers is no more an impeachment of any design field or designers as the existence of shitty developers is an impeachment of development or developers.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#588

Post by nradov »

swader999 wrote: post #468
analog31 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many more than three "dimensions" if I may use the term loosely, in software or hardware engineering. Cost, safety, interaction between subsystems (developed by different engineering disciplines), tolerances, supply chain, manufacturing, reliability, the laws of physics, possibly chemistry and environmental interactions, regulatory, investor forgiveness, etc. Traditional engineering also doesn't have the op…

The top three are typically quality, budget and time. Usually a compromise is needed on one of these. You could replace quality with features in SW dev.

Scope is more of a dimension than quality. In theory it might be possible to accept lower quality in order to cut the budget or accelerate the time but in practice that doesn't seem to work. Any significant reduction in quality usually causes the project to grind to a halt after the prototype stage. You just can't build any new features when everything is broken.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#589

Post by array_key_first »

yallpendantools wrote: post #421
array_key_first wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you're cheating a bit here. You're basically assuming the user has never seen a text prompt before. Which is a good assumption. But, if we assume the user has never seen a graphical application before, then likely all GUI tools will be useless too. What is clicking? What does this X do? What's a desktop again? I don't understand, why do I need 1 million pixels to change an mp3 to an avi? What does that window l…

The difference is a lot of "computer education" (as opposed to computing education most in this forum have) has happened with GUIs. "Simple" CLI tools doesn't mean they're understandable or even user-friendly. Heck, even computing education (and the profession even!) has been propped up by GUIs. After my first year in CS, there were like only three to five of us in a section of forty to fifty who could compile Java f…

I agree with pretty much all of this, I think where the divergence is what to do about it. IMO, tool wise, nothing - this is an education issue.

And onto your point about CLI tools often making too little assumptions: this is 100% true, and also a superpower. There's a reason that a tool like ffmpeg can spawn 1000 GUI programs from it, each with their own draws. It's a generic tool, not necessarily an application. Many CLI programs are like this.

That can raise the complexity but it's a tradeoff. Many GUIs are too "happy path" centralized, and that happy path is different for different people, so they become cumbersome and unintuitive in too many use cases. A great example would be just about everything Microsoft makes.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#590

Post by array_key_first »

csin wrote: post #399
array_key_first wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inverse is also true. If you prioritize the first five minutes, your software is worthless in any industry that matters. And that's why designers are using Photoshop and not Microsoft paint.

See, I feel this is where programmers just don't "get" good UI design. Photoshop is good UI design. A normie can use photoshop the same way they use MS paint. Albeit it just loads slower. A normie doesn't need all the bells and whistles. They can just use photoshop like a glorified MS paint. You can't do that with GIMP. It's actually really fucking annoying, if you try to use GIMP to do a MS paint job.

> Photoshop is good UI design. A normie can use photoshop the same way they use MS paint.

This is just straight up not true. You're only saying this because you, presumably, have used Photoshop.

It has a million buttons, layers are a thing, there's a million tools, etc. No, they can't just pick it up because it's complex software for a complex problem domain.

Maybe you disagree. Okay. Pick a different example. 3D Max? Why aren't studios using Microsoft Paint 3D instead of 3D max?

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