> > > > > What's naive about simplicity? > > > Simplicity is not always the best. Some things need to be complex. > Ardour, Blender, Pro-Tools, Autocad, these are examples of things that I > believe are necessarily complex. Of course I still believe that there > is room for improvement in usability, but I do not think that simplicity > should always be the goal. >
Well you can't make a "make great music button".. But with Patchage, routing audio can be quite easy. Blender is only as complex as a 3D program normally is, if you look at any other 3D package you will see that. What I'm talking about is not having to scour the folders of linux to get something done. I also know that Linux is inspired by Unix, that simplified computers by making everything a file, so simplicity takes different forms, but there is need for higher-level access to the low-level system, and it can be done without losing flexibility. For example using sliders to select enumerated values rather than having to parse a text file which is more error prone than using a program that has intimate knowledge of say a binary file or a XML format. Gconf-editor and "about:config" in firefox are perfect examples. One thing I've noticed about many artists and musicians, is that they will learn a complex program if it gets the job done (so complex that a programmer would have a hard time finding their way around in it), but they cringe when having to navigate the internals of the Linux filesystem and read text files and so on. So the solution is just a different interface that doesn't require typing. > > > Some people make things complex for politics sake.. I thought Linux > > would grow, if it could leave behind the politics of commercial > > software development behind.. But I guess I was wrong. > > > Blind, slavish devotion to simplicity is also not a good perspective, > you end up with neutered products that are not all that useful. I > wonder what you mean by "if it could leave behind the politics of > commercial software development behind"? Most open source developers > that I know make software that they actually want to use, not something > that was built to satisfy some sales or marketing checklist. > No, what I'm talking about is the focus on making things complex for the sake of selling software.. It does occur.. Examples given.. In Enterprise software development, companies will write software in obscure languages for the sole purpose of avoiding being succeeded by outsourced coders in say india, that would have access to C compilers (GCC), but wouldn't easily have access to something like Delphi or C# . There are other examples of unecessary complexity, such as what Java was supposed to be, and what it is. The minute Sun decided to deprecate any arm of the Java tree, they disobeyed the assumption that Java was "write once, run anywhere". They did this for commercial reasons, I'm sure. But there is no reason to drop accessibility to features, unless you are worried about support and believe people will get confused and such. I doubt it has anything to do with efficiency, pointers allow for simplicity and efficiency, if we had not used memory pointers, modern computing would not be possible. And what is an arm of options in a programming language than a library, and a pointer to the library. Sorry confusing this with programmers you know.. But there are some in the linux crowd who I believe don't see any reason in fixing things because it let in the simple-minded wackos. And that's politics. But the truth is, if you want linux to be adopted, it doesn't have to be like a Mac or Windows, things just need to be more accessible, by other interfaces. The example I gave above was "typing" can be a barrier to entry. How many people do you know who can and can't type, then how many people do you know who can type, but can't manage the interaction with the computer. Each hurdle reduces the size of your audience. For the record, I once blew up my Amiga 1000 keyboard (cause it has a phone jack, and I connected it to the phone jack terminal), and was able to make music with it for a year without the use of the keyboard. The only time I had to use the keyboard was to save files, and I used copy and paste on the file requester. My website http://www.chann3lz.com/ , permits people to contribute their tastes in music and video, without the use of a keyboard, most everything is links. It also permits anyone from around the world to share their favorites through the use of bookmarklets and if they choose. How do you experience the best music from parts of the world with any other interface, especially if you don't know the culture or the language? On my site, you can perform additive/subtractive tag searches on youtube from the search system without typing. It's a ugly site, I admit, but it serves the purpose, and I don't keep page hits on the popularity, but you can check the FEEDJIT below the page. I'm guessing somewhere in the range of about 200,000 judging from my bandwidth use and the page size in bytes. BTW, blender is a lot easier now than it used to be. But I also know how to use the old blender too. I know how to do UV texturing on objects without the UV texturing interface, it was called Sticky textures, it utilized the projection of the camera coordinates onto a mesh, and the application of the texture with UV mapping on, it wasn't pretty, but it offered UV texturing support in absence of an interface for UV texturing. At that time, the only other freeware alternative 3D package was POV-ray. Also, blender was created after Ton decided that it would be better to write his own 3D software in-house than to buy a seat of Wavefront TAV, which he got a free trial for two weeks. He used the money his company had to buy an SGI workstation. blender is a better program partially because it is open source, but more than 50% of the features that still exist are there because they were needed for real work. It wasn't until he decided to develop blender as a freeware application full time, that he parted ways with his media company NeoGeo. He had originally thought he'd open source it, but decided that it was much to complex to be useful, so he developed it until it could be used, then tried to make a commercial application out of it, that didn't fly. His company NaN went bankrupt, the VC took the program and vaulted it. Then Ton begged that the program would serve no greater purpose than to have its sources released. He was able to convince the VC to open the sources, to the tune of about 86,000 dollars, provided by fans of the software. But after that, he continued to try to keep control over the sources, and obscure access to blender. It was users such as myself that cornered him, and said "this really needs to be shared, this needs to be developed by others, it needs to be accessible to the public, and so on". He then gave up control, educated developers about the internals of blender, and such, and the users and developers gave him authority over the direction for blender. It succeeded because everyone was able to share in the effort, and users could have their voices heard, rather than being ignored, which is why in the freeware end of blender that the package was earning a bad reputation, because it lacked accessibility, it would not load or save any file formats, without the use of python scripts, it lacked the features to make character animation, it didn't support a lot of the video formats that other open source packages had.. Also some features in the program like axis constraint by middle click with a combined gesture was to hard for new users to pick up (although I mastered it, regardless of perspective). I informed many users in the early part of blender's use by providing tutorials and passing on knowledge that Ton passed onto me first hand. I've got long emails on DAT tapes of my discussions with Ton, one of these days I should get them out. But in the beginning of blender release, is had very little confidence in it's adoption. It took others to see the value in what he had.
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