

Splashup reviewd by a User Interface blog. - It's pretty rough - Readmore
http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/12/03/user-interface-of-the-day-splashupcom/
Not trying to pick on anyone. It's just good to hear honest feedback, especially about an interface.
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derefr
This sounds like a review of Fireworks:

"...The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must
manually dississed [sic]; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below
the menu-bar and doesn't interrupt your work. The first method is horrible,
the second is decent."

"For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to
work when you click on them, but they don't have any effect unless you already
have text selected."

"Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had
accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text
objects." (Excepting the fact that empty (sub-)layers in Fireworks are
destroyed when you exit them.)

"...there are "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons at the top of the screen, and
nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons" and
"you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked
region in the extreme corner."

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herdrick
When you want a really powerful tool, you usually have to accept a tougher
learning curve. Yes, most web apps should be immediately understandable, their
features laid plain to the first-time user. The problem is, advanced image
editing involves a ton of UI moving parts. I think most of what those guys
complain about are things where Splashup carefully follows the Photoshop UI. I
think these web UI guys aren't approaching Splashup in the right way.

------
downer
I wonder if a retargeted GTK library would allow you to run The Gimp as an
AJAX application; either that or perhaps a Flash FreeNX client.

Ulteo made OpenOffice work online: [http://lifehacker.com/software/online-
documents/use-openoffi...](http://lifehacker.com/software/online-
documents/use-openoffice-online-with-ulteo-332841.php)

~~~
tx
Gimp as AJAX application? Jesus... not only this sentence makes no sense
("AJAX" is just one stupid function call), but the idea of running everything
"online" is just silly.

WHY would I want to screw myself in the butt by using "online apps" for
editing my digital camera photos? Why would I want to wait hours for 2GB of
photos to get uploaded at 35kb/sec and then limit myself to a pathetic subset
of perfectly functioning desktop application?

Because there are many techies out there who are greedy and fail to innovate,
preferring to re-implement tiny fractions of existing software instead. And
burning someone else's millions in the process.

I will not be surprised if we'll see hard drive formatting utilities, backed
by VC millions, running inside of the browser, so you can "Format your Drive
from Anywhere!!!"

A lot of Valley people need to stop drinking kool-aid and read uncov.com more
often.

~~~
SwellJoe
Yeah, because nobody wants to upload and store their photos on the web--so
they certainly don't want to be able to edit them once stored there.

You're just missing the point by a mile. Online photo editing is a great
feature for people who have already committed their entire photo collection to
flickr (or one of the other several dozen competitors). There will come a time
when photos are mostly taken by cell phone cameras, uploaded on the spot, and
never dealt with except in an online form. An online editor is the only sane
solution.

But, I agree that porting GIMP to forward its UI out to a browser is madness.
Writing a GTK to JavaScript layer is probably significantly harder than
writing an image editor from scratch in pure JavaScript or Flash (at least the
20% solution that'll satisfy 80% of users).

~~~
tx
Wow, I am surprised I did not get downvoted into oblivion for my previous
post. However, I am convinced that you're missing a point by a mile.

 _Nobody_ has committed their photo collections to flickr, because it is
insane: people generate gigabytes of images with their cameras and upload only
a tiny fraction of what they have, most of the time downsampled to a
manageable size. Moreover, the sizes of image files (JPEGs) keep growing,
while uploading speeds have stuck at 20-60kb/sec for 95% users.

This pattern is true not only for images, it's true for everything: the speed
at which people generate data is only accelerating - from simple text
documents we've moved to music, images, video and god knows what else.
Sticking everything into the "cloud" will not work. Even today an average PC
has tens of gigabytes of data. Soon that number will reach terabytes. Think
about X-megapixel cameras, recorded TV shows, HD-movies, etc. The size of the
backup drives will keep growing, while the speeds of internet connections will
not.

Internet is a distributed computing platform with very powerful computing
nodes (your computers). The opportunities of exploiting this are fascinating.
SETI is a great example of using Internet right. Skype and torrents are
another ones.

What these cloud companies are doing, however, is plain stupid in comparison:
they're sucking in the computational complexity from "powerful nodes" only to
re-distribute the load on their end onto their own nodes without any hope to
keep up. What for?

I know that Microsoft is out of fashion today, but Ray Ozzie is absolutely
right when he is talking about maintaining a reasonable (sane!) balance
between client machines and "clouds". This point of view is not terribly
popular among some YC readers, who are too fascinated and tempted by a slight
chance of getting rich by re-implementing 2% of some perfectly fine desktop
software in 2 months with a handful of python scripts running on cheap Amazon
servers.

------
tptacek
Are these reviews by the same team that tried to clone Quicksilver for Windows
and wound up with nothing more than Launchy set in Garamond?

~~~
jacobolus
First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do
with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in
general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are
usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully
criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills.

Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning
curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that,
experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of
place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new
application, with its own ideas.

Third, what the hell is Launchy?

~~~
tptacek
It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege
that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X.

In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.

~~~
mwerty
Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.

~~~
tptacek
Ok, let's all have a debate about neurosurgery!

~~~
mwerty
If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?

