On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Gil Freund wrote:
> Omer Zak wrote:
> > 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.
> > 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.
> He is wrong, and the answer is found in his basic assumptions: UI costs
> money *AND* foss do not have that money:
This assumption is true most of the time for most of the Free Software
projects. But it means that a replacement for cash infusion needs to be
found. Several of my suggestions below address this point.
> 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.
Both points don't contradict the general statement - if they were paid
(in money or otherwise) for their jobs, they'd have time to find and fix
those problems.
> > 1. How would people, who want to be GUI designers, get trained in the
> > art of GUI design?
> Read Eduard Tufte's books on design. It's not UI, but on how to present
> information, and check out Orelly's "Annoyance" series.
s/get trained/get experience/ - mea culpa.
> > 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.
How does this refute my points?
> > 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.
Not necessarily. LGPLed widget sets would allow building commercial GUIs
from them. Or even GPLed ones with special exception for allowing use for
constructing proprietary GUIs. Where is the contradiction with my
suggestion that special licensing models might help?
> 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.
I don't envision this as being prohibitively difficult.
Software, which captures user's actions (keypresses and mouse actions -
after being interpreted by the target application) for a long time and
finds repeated patterns - might construct wizards for those repeated
patterns. The big stumbling block is to make such software interoperate
with the wide variety of GUI applications out there.
The wizards won't initially be pretty but the user might later tweak the
GUI (if the wizards are compatible with GUI design tools like glade) to
fit better the task on hand.
> > 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 limitsyour options.
Not exactly. You have (or supposed to have) access to the interface
between the GUI and the Free software modules. So you can implement your
better features as long as they work with the same interface. So you
still get some benefit from the Free Software model.
--- 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
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
