In http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability , John Gruber explains why (in his opinion), Free Software is destined to always suck in terms of GUI quality.He is wrong, and the answer is found in his basic assumptions: UI costs
I don't know if he is right or not. But I'd like to wear my Optimist Hat and try to come up with reasons why he might, after all, be wrong.
money *AND* foss do not have that money:
CUPS (the original example given) is an foss project from a company that
make a parallel commercial product. It has a licensing cash flow and
therefor has money not related only to "support and service". The same
is true of Mozilla, Openoffice.org and opengroupware, to name just a few.
The CUPS example is excellent in the sense of how an _implementation_ of
a foss product has failed.
1. The project maintainer implemented a security feature without referencing it in the documentation.
2. The distro maintainer entered a a package into the distro without due consideration of how the package operated in the distro environment.
Read Eduard Tufte's books on design. It's not UI, but on how to present information, and check out Orelly's "Annoyance" series.
1. How would people, who want to be GUI designers, get trained in the art of GUI design?
2. Widely-used Free Software is an unbeatable way to advertise one's GUI design expertise.I would think the same holds true for advertising your coding skills.
3. Reduction of effort and cost of building excellent GUI by reusing composite controls, design patterns, templates (like wizards) and prior art.True, but they this contradicts what you state in section 5. A commercial (G)UI would prohibit that.
I think KDE and Gnome try to achieve this.
4. Super-GUIs, which over time learn what and how users actually perform their tasks; and then automatically construct special-purpose wizards to help the users perform those tasks with minimum effort. The learning is not necessarily confined to a single user/installation.Are you talking about AI or machine learnability? If so, this is science fiction.
5. Licensing models (like LGPL), which allow an application to be split into Free part with command line interface, and Proprietary part, which implements top-notch GUI.
Bad idea. Consider the Bynari mail server. This is a collection of foss products (OpenLDAP, Postfix, Cyrus IMAP and other) collected and integrated with a cool management GUI and and outlook connector. This is a very robust exchange replacement. In order for this to work, you are forced to use the versions of the foss applications bynari can interact with. This means that you end up for a propriety solution, that limits your options.
--- Omer My opinions, as expressed in this E-mail message, are mine alone. They do not represent the official policy of any organization with which I may be affiliated in any way. WARNING TO SPAMMERS: at http://www.zak.co.il/spamwarning.html
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