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Free software scares normal people

danieldelaney.net

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Re: Free software scares normal people

#591

Post by array_key_first »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #488
galagawinkle489 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly this is not true. Photoshop is difficult to use. I have opened it and tried to use it many times. Its UI is super complicated. There are endless buttons and I have no idea how to do anything. There are heaps of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, which wouldn't be necessary if what you said were true. I used GIMP to do MS paint stuff years ago when I used it fairly regularly. GIMP is always a whipping boy for UI…

> If you want to see bad UI design a much better example is something like Visual Studio. What a mess. Yeah, big button "Create project" and another, albeit smaller, button for "Run" puts a really high bar for the user to jump over. Nothin as good as plain old cc followed by a bunch of cryptic flags.

The main problem is that neither of those buttons make it clear what the fuck they're actually doing and also they don't work.

Download a random solution. Will the run button work? I highly doubt it.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#592

Post by DrewADesign »

max51 wrote: post #573
DrewADesign wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I think it's because they are not using the product they are designing. A lot of problems you typically see in modern UIs would have been fixed before release if the people writing it were forced to use it daily for their job. For example, dropdown menus with 95 elements and no search/filter function that are to…

There’s a real difference in usage style between developers and most other users. Having the background knowledge to understand what’s going on behind the curtain makes it easy to deal with things like interactive visual complexity, tons of data and moving parts at the same timetime, implementation warts, etc.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#593

Post by DrewADesign »

angiolillo wrote: post #574
hilong2 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I still struggle with is writing interfaces for complex use cases in an intuitive and simple manner that minimizes required movements and context switching. Are there any good resources for developing good UX for necessarily complex use cases?

> any good resources for developing good UX for necessarily complex use cases? For teasing apart complex workflows I'd suggest Holtzblatt and Beyer's Contextual Design book, I taught a user-centered research and design class many years ago and used that as our textbook, hopefully it still holds up. For organizing complex applications I like to start with affinity diagrams, card sorts, and collaborative whiteboard ses…

I haven’t read that book. Thanks for the rec

Re: Free software scares normal people

#594

Post by latexr »

f33d5173 wrote: post #584
latexr wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, of course not. The point is that in the meantime (the problem was eventually solved) such a tool bridges the gap.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#595

Post by Max-Limelihood »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #569
presbyterian wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a huge Mac fan for a decade or more, at least, and not only is Tahoe the least popular release I've seen, it's the first one where the majority of people I hear from dislike it. It's bad enough that I haven't updated still, I'm waiting a few point releases at least to see how they fix it up, and I'm trying out Linux distros to see what I'll start using if I have to move away.

Mac->Linux swapper here (back in April). I left after they screwed me on a hardware situation. Honestly I’ve really enjoyed the swap. But man I really miss having iMessages across my devices as well as the shared clipboard. By far the two things I missed the most. Everything else I’ve kind of moved on from and can’t even think of off the top of my head anymore

Yeah, Apple is well-known for being completely insane on this kind of stuff—whenever someone builds an app for this, Apple immediately sets about hunting down and banning iMessage users they suspect of using it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38646903 https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/21/doj-calls-out-apple-for-br... https://www.wired.com/story/beeper-apple-imessage-fight/

Re: Free software scares normal people

#596

Post by galagawinkle489 »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #488
galagawinkle489 wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly this is not true. Photoshop is difficult to use. I have opened it and tried to use it many times. Its UI is super complicated. There are endless buttons and I have no idea how to do anything. There are heaps of Photoshop tutorials on YouTube, which wouldn't be necessary if what you said were true. I used GIMP to do MS paint stuff years ago when I used it fairly regularly. GIMP is always a whipping boy for UI…

> If you want to see bad UI design a much better example is something like Visual Studio. What a mess. Yeah, big button "Create project" and another, albeit smaller, button for "Run" puts a really high bar for the user to jump over. Nothin as good as plain old cc followed by a bunch of cryptic flags.

I'm talking about the user interface, not how difficult it to click a button to do basic actions.

VS is incredibly cluttered. Too many buttons, cryptic icons and entirely unclear how to do things in the options.

I'm not comparing it to cc but to be fair that is actually well documented and hasn't changed its user interface in decades.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#597

Post by fn-mote »

tombert wrote: post #527
simonask wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Linux won't arbitrarily irrevocably brick your computer because of an automatic update. To the average user, it absolutely will . Unless they happen to run on particularly well-supported hardware, the days of console tinkering aren't gone, even on major distros. What's fixable to the average Linux user and what's fixable to the average person (whose job is not to run Linux) are two very, very different things.

If you run a modern distro with a modern filesystem, you can at the very least have automatic snapshots that actually work, and you can restore to a previous state if an update breaks things. The same cannot be said for Windows.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I would not give anybody good odds of booting from a snapshot on Ubuntu/ZFS.

I would expect that booting from an older kernel would work, possibly in recovery mode.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#598

Post by fn-mote »

jcelerier wrote: post #581
latexr wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

LLM's exist now.

Google could do this years ago.

It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it, but you'll find the solution quickly because many other people also experience the problem.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#599

Post by f33d5173 »

latexr wrote: post #594
f33d5173 wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, of course not. The point is that in the meantime (the problem was eventually solved) such a tool bridges the gap.

The people with the know how to use such a tool are more likely to use a swiss army knife tool than a specialized one off tool. The article mentions someone using windows photo viewer to do the conversion.

Re: Free software scares normal people

#600

Post by user205738 »

miki123211 wrote: post #404
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…

To design a good user interface, you need a feedback loop that tells you how people actually use your software. That feedback loop should be as painless for the user as possible. Having people to man a 1-800 number is one way to get that feedback loop. Professional user testing is another. Telemetry / analytics / user tracking, or even being able to pull out statistics from a database on your server, is yet another.…

Those who have been using Linux for a long time have very useful terminals with syntax highlighting, auto-completion, typo correction and many other bells and whistles.

In addition, muscle memory has been developed and there is experience.

They don't realize that newbies don't have any of this, and it's very inconvenient to type commands in the terminal without it. You may not be able to copy and paste them the way they are used to (right mouse button or Ctrl-V)

The terminal in linux makes people hysterical and angry.

The problem could be partially solved by adding auto-completion and auto-correction to the default iso.

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