Slashdot Mirror
LinSpire LPhoto and LSongs: bring on the lawsuits!
Sir Joltalot writes "Over at OSNews they're covering the newly-renamed LinSpire's LSongs and LPhoto apps. Take a look at those screenshots, and you'll notice a striking resemblence to Apple's iTunes and iPhoto. Take a look at this flash presentation and you'll see that LPhoto and iPhoto are almost exactly alike. They look like nifty apps, to be sure, but how long will they last? I would have thought LinSpire might have learned from the whole Lindows name fiasco..."
Say it isn't so!
Call me a cynic, but before this entire thing, I never gave Lindows/Linspire a second glance. Now, they've been in the top of the news here at Slashdot several times. Nothing like staying in the eyes of your target audience, I guess?
It's amazing how similar the apps are, and yet LTunes still manages to look pants in comparison to iTunes. All this despite having almost exactly the same set of controls on the screen. There's more to this design business than you think.
This argument doesn't hold water.
Someone brings out a nice product, then someone brings out an OSS clone of it. If anyone complains, slashdotters insist that you can't patent 'usability', and that the original product was somehow the obvious end result of solving a particular usabiliity problem
Then someone brings out another product that solves it in a different and superior way. Then someone clones that, etc...
It's blatantly not true that the iTunes or iPhoto interface is the only possible way of solving the music/photo management usability problem. It's blatantly true that the Linspire dudes are saving money on R&D by ripping off Apple (& Microsoft) so they can invest it in other things like marketing (and legal defence).
But what happens if the innovating companies go away? What happens if nobody bothers with R&D? Who will Linspire rip off then?
Just take a look at OpenOffice...look familiar to anyone? Down to the toolbars and icons, it is a clone of Word. By design, to make the transition between the two apps easier.
So it's OK for "our" apps to copy the look and feel of a competitor we don't like, yet not OK for an "outsider" to copy the look and feel of a competitor palatable to many of us?
Give me a break...
It was only resolved in reference to Apple v. Microsoft (and even there, Apple didn't lose on the merits of protecting look and feel, but on the wording in the licensing agreement it had with MS).
If you can argue that your product has a distinctive look and feel, then you can register for trade dress protection.
Also: you can apply for a patent for an interface (which someone else pointed out Apple has done for iPhoto).
Another question I'd have about it is those buttons in LPhoto. Call me a pessimist, but after using Linux (and various other *nixes) on the desktop for years, I have no confidence that the Print button is actually going to relay the selected photo to my printer in a way that it'll be a reasonable facsimile of what I see on the screen.
Y'know, if they had just taken the concept instead, and actually I think they're going in the right direction here, it would have gone over well with me (and I'm sure many others).
What I think they're trying to do here is copy what Apple is doing right down to the interface, but I mean why? Apple has identified some key apps that Joe Average wants to use, fair enough. Take that idea and run with it, but they should have completely diverged from Apple's own applications and come up with something new, or extend any of the pretty spiffy applications that already exists under X windows.
What works in Aqua doesn't work everywhere, and I think it's because of the widgets. That layout, given the toolset that most X Window system developers have, that layout just doesn't work.
-- The unsig...
Yes, cry me a river.
When apps _don't_ copy the look'and'feel we get all this whining about how the interface is "weird". See also: GIMP, Blender
So basically linux application GUIs are only allowed to exist in the interval marked "very very familiar -- not too different -- but different enough for my taste."
Anything else, queue the whining.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
The screenshots are terrible. Is linspire a professional product? With which companies/OS is it trying to compete?
I thought that Linux UI had got beyond this stage?
And the problem is barely with the fact that they've virtually screenshot-copied from iTunes, but with the fact that the rest of the simple presentation elements (lists, titles, etc) are really poorly displayed. There's no alignment for example (something that would give it a lot of clarity), or spacing (visual simplicity, eases the user). It's the UI equivalent of a ransom note -- bits and pieces cut from elsewhere.
I understand that this is a commercially sold operating system. If they want to improve the UI of these products, I believe that I could do a better job!
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
Design is more than just what pieces you throw together. It's all about carefully choosing those pieces, understanding how they relate, and then compositing them carefully. And doing that correctly improves a program's appearance and usability. It's an important lesson to keep in mind, whatever type of use your interface is going to have.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The same could be said of KDE (Windows ripoff), Evolution (Outlook ripoff), XMMS (WinAmp ripoff), KDevelop (DevStudio ripoff) and I daresay quite a few other OSS projects.