
John Gruber Explains Why Free Software Has Poor Usability - nickb
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/02/mpt-free-software-usability
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ajross
This is mostly cheap shot journalism. Sure, there's lots of free software out
there with awful interfaces. But there's equally a ton of commercial software
that's bad, and for many of the same reasons. Take a look at the crapware
installed on any new Dell box, for example.

It's true that at the very high end, the "polish" of commercial software is
better. There's no free equivalent to, say, Apple's release and UI artwork
processes. But that's not strictly a "usability" critique. There's plenty of
beautiful-but-clunky software out there.

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pauljonas
To be expected from the Gruber-bot.

Don't you know? Apple is awesome, and those who criticize them "just don't get
it".

I am writing this on a Apple MBP, so it's not like I have total disdain for
Apple products, but Apple fanboys can be infuriating…

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maximilian
He doesn't even really mention apple once in his article. He clearly loves
most things apple, but he wouldn't hesitate to criticize apple if they do
silly things.

Its much more convincing to criticize his argument than just him. He makes a
strong point - Software interfaces only are as good as the head guy in charge
cares about. So if the head guy doesn't care much about the interface, the
interface will suck even if there are great designers working on the project.

I'd say that open source software often has medium to poor interface quality
is that making software look good takes a lot of time and has to be done by
someone with design talent. This isn't usually the case - usually the lead
programmer decided how it would look from the beginning, or just copied some
other software.

If anything, open source software is usually decent because they most often
just copy some commercial piece of software - which is usually decent. In the
few cases where they get creative with the interface (like the gimp) it can
come out half-baked because they don't spend enough time evaluating the
usability of the design. (not that the gimp interface is half-baked).

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pauljonas
But he's no Mark Pilgrim!

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mark-t
You know, I just don't see it. Maybe it's because I'm a developer, but I just
don't see that many usability problems in open source projects, and these
articles are going out of their way to avoid giving concrete examples. I'm
marking this (the MPT article) down as Microsoft propaganda until the
"interface design experts" start pointing things out.

It's not like it would be hard. Configuring Xorg makes me cry, and CUPS was
still no walk in the park last time I checked.

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thamer
I don't see many problems either, probably because I am a full-time GNU/Linux
user, but another application that is often pointed out as difficult to use is
The GIMP. I actually disagree with the premise that GIMP is hard to use, and
find it quite intuitive for basic operations; most critiques actually complain
that it doesn't have the Photoshop look&feel.

It often boils down to the difficult task of discerning usability,
intuitiveness, efficiency, and familiarity.

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mark-t
Actually, I do have trouble with Gimp, too. I have to google how to make a
straight line every time. Choosing brushes and changing the color are a pain,
too. But I don't use it often, and about half the time I'm using it where I
would have used MS Paint when I used Windows. There's probably a toy program
somewhere that fills that gap, and I just haven't bothered looking. Maybe I
should pick up Xfig.

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jcl
As I recall, Photoshop doesn't have a line tool, either; you make lines with
the brush tool and the shift key, just like in GIMP -- or you use the vector
tools.

For people accustomed to basic painting applications that provide all manner
of circles, lines, and squares, it comes as a surprise that such tools are so
buried in Photoshop or GIMP. But it turns out that drawing lines is simply not
that important for most Photoshop users, since lines aren't that important for
photo touchup, creating web graphics, or digital painting. For line-heavy art,
there are better tools like Illustrator.

The problem is that GIMP is tasked with replacing both Photoshop and MS Paint
on the Linux desktop. The hidden assumption is that since Photoshop is more
"powerful", its feature set is adequate for typical MS Paint tasks... which is
akin to assuming that Linux doesn't need a word processor because TeX is more
powerful.

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rosss
Photoshop has a line tool, and circles, lines, squares, etc. are very
important for many applications of Photoshop.

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Prrometheus
I wonder if the recent resurgence of Apple will have a positive effect on the
usability of the entire software industry. With so many geeks using macbook
pros, it's only a matter of time before that aesthetic finds its way into more
open source projects.

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sc
Plenty of commercial software has poor usability. In general, it's hard to
find people who can condense behavior into an intuitive workflow.

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greyhat
Gruber does not deserve to be linked here... 99% of his blog is just him
trying to keep up the price of his Apple stock...

