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).
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).