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Microsoft Reaches Out To Blender
dmbasso writes "Continuing its strategy to support FOSS application on the Windows platform, Microsoft mailed the Blender developers asking how they could help improve the experience of Blender users on Windows. Groklaw puts it in perspective using Steve Ballmer's own words."
I dont know if it is sad or funny that when speaking about open source they were talking about if file systems had any problem.... lets not talk about API or anything trivial like that but hey this file system seems to be really meddling with creating a better UI and experience in Windows.
And OOXML.. seriously! Like how about they just release the stndards of OOXML to begin with!
Which FOSS projects are most vulnerable to this approach? A list of those approached would be interesting.
Ok, you know what. I doubt there is any convincing you because like so many other people, you've already made up your mind based on what you've heard.
So don't use the word intuitive then because its probably the wrong word to use when talking about 3d software. Let's say this instead, once you've really spent some time learning Blender's interface, you will start to think that a lot of other 3d user interfaces have it wrong. At least I did. I used Imagine for years and I thought Imagine made a lot of sense, but after using Blender for 3 months and actually spending time to learn it, I'm so much faster at creating objects in Blender than I ever was in Imagine.
I think what has happened, is that the myth that it is hard to use has preceded the application. Blender is not the only software with this problem.
Based on the snip that Ton posted, I get the impression that MS doesn't comprehend what Blender is, or how it works. File formats? That's low on the list of Blender's issues with Windows. Never mind that OOXML's status as an ISO standard is debatable.
If MS wants to support Blender (and lots of other FOSS software) on Windows, they need to put real effort into supporting OpenGL. FOSS developers don't generally bother with supporting DirectX and OpenGL, and most of the time supporting Windows at all is an afterthought.
But, MS won't do it because that would make it easier for games to be developed for Windows and anything else.
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03020.pdf
That's MS's philosopy about "open" standards in 1999, and it's their philosphy in 2008.
Actually 3D programs were never that much on Digital machines. Mostly Amigas. The most successful 3D program in broadcast TV was LightSpeed made ONLY for Amiga. It got Ported to Mac and PC when the Amiga died.
As someone who really prefers open software to proprietary software whenever I can help it, I have to say that I really have no hatred for Open XML. I have no illusion that Open XML is anything other than an attempt by Microsoft to maintain Office market control in the face of increasing government regulations demanding open formats. However, no matter how you spin it, Open XML is better than the older binary blobs. In the whole spectrum of openness, this is a good thing (tm).
Sure, ODF would be better, but Office moving from binary blob to clearly defined standard with a clear "promise not to sue" people who violate the patents in order to implement Open XML is a win for everyone. Not as big of a win as you might want, but it is a win.
And as far as Blender goes, before I read the article I thought that Microsoft were going to try to convince Blender devs to move to .Net on the interface or something that would make it less cross-platform. Instead, they want to help Blender devs implement file formats used in Windows. Microsoft gains something because their file formats will be more utilized elsewhere, Blender gains the ability to import / export to more file formats (which is always a good thing). As long as they don't default to saving to proprietary formats, everyone involved wins again.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
I have had varying experience with almost every major application released in the past decade and hands down Maya was the quickest to learn and most logically laid out. You just sorta work with it, and the interface is consistent across the board, which makes learning it alot easier. Plus the introduction of QWERT for Select, Transform, Rotate, Scale, Repeat last was simply brilliant and is now being copied by 3DS Max and Softimage. Ditto for the 3d manipulators for transforming/scaling/rotating on a give axis was simply brilliant and again, has been cloned by most other applications. Where it gets truly brilliant though is in having the same controls while in the UI, the timeline, the hypergraph, etc...
Blender is not intuitive, anything but. The iconic interface is confused and the interface is inconsistent. Of the various 3D apps I have had exposure to, only pre-XSI Softimage and Houdini are worse then Blender. Cinema 4D is brilliant for some things, as is Lightwave. Max is a nice app, but getting loaded down with blaot over the years. Again Maya is the best of the best IMHO, while straight modelers like Silo and Modo are pretty nice.
You know what else is intuitive like the Blender UI ?
American English.
It makes perfect sense, once you learn all the double-entendres, transient jargon and collective ignorance that pervades all digital and print media. There really is no other language on the planet that gyrates anywhere near as much as English.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"Ok, you know what. I doubt there is any convincing you because like so many other people, you've already made up your mind based on what you've heard."
Well, you can take your sour grapes, but I made up my mind after I USED THE DAMN SOFTWARE. I hadn't heard anything about Blender's UI beforehand. What you have is my experience. I realize you have an emotional attachment to Blender, and you truly want it to be as wonderful as you believe it is - but you're only fooling yourself.
"So don't use the word intuitive"
I guess I have to remind you that *you* are the one who used the word "intuitive"?
"its probably the wrong word to use when talking about 3d software"
No, it's the wrong word to use when talking about *Blender*. I've encountered a couple of 3d packages that were intuitive (Lightwave 3 is one. I just sat down and started working with it.)
"I used Imagine for years and I thought Imagine made a lot of sense"
I also used Imagine for years (before I discovered LW.) It does some things well, others not so much. It's better than Caligari, not as good as LW.
"I think what has happened, is that the myth that it is hard to use has preceded the application."
No, what has happened is that Blender got a reputation for being difficult to use because it is.
Yeah, it's funny that...they probably think I'm some big FOSS advocate that hates windows and everything about it, when in reality I've never managed to grasp Linux and actually use Vista...
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
LetterRip
I don't doubt that Blender is a helpful and powerful tool if you use it daily, but the user interface has a learning curve like the cliffs of Dover. As a veteran user of PovRay and a raft of other 3D tools I am more than happy with the array of tools Blender offers to create, bend, sculpt, distort, warp, arrange, and otherwise mangle 3D objects, so at an abstract level it is quite clear what to do to create 3D objects. In that sense I am even willing to grant that Blender is `intuitive'.
However, HOWEVER, the Blender user interface is totally unhelpful in explaining how to use these tools. Blender throws at the user a collection of panels and buttons and windows that is different from what anyone else is doing, and requires you learn a vast number of keystrokes, slang terms, magical pixels to click or drag, and all that with little or no handholding. Where are the tooltips, popup menus, help windows, or even just nods to standard user interfaces? And can you please make some of these magical areas to click or drag a little more obvious and a little larger, please? Optionally then?
You could argue that editors like vi and Emacs do exactly the same: they require you to learn magical keystrokes with little or no handholding. However, there you can get by with a limited set of magic that let you do your thing, although perhaps not in the most efficient way. Precisely because 3D editing is so difficult, that is not possible in Blender. You have to learn quite a lot of the Blender magic to do anything meaningful.
I've tried to learn Blender at least three times, and one time I even bought a book to learn it. Every time I gave up in disgust because I just didn't have the time to learn all that magic and got disgusted by the unhelpful Blender UI that clearly has no time at all for newcomers. Every time I decided that I was better off spending my time writing PovRay code. (And $DEITY knows PovRay has its own interesting collection of quirks, weird limitations, and cranky developers.)
In short: yes, in one sense Blender is intuitive. However, at another level it is just a impenetrable jumble of buttons and dials that is more complicated to use than an airplane.
Exactly so. If Microsoft really wants to improve the software... then commit your own programmers to the project and put your improvements back into the community.
So let's say Microsoft committed its own programmers to the project. What would be the best use of those programmers' time? Don't you suppose the best way to find the answer to that question would be to ASK?Also, improving the application isn't the only thing Microsoft is asking about here. They're also asking, how can we improve our OS to make it easier for you guys to get your application to work the way you want?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Nearly everyone I know who used or administered Solaris, for example, used the GNU tools.
Also, Linux is just a kernel. Without a userland (or at least a C runtime library), you can't use it for general-purpose devices.
If you have a GNU/Linux system, remove every project created or maintained by the GNU project. Then reboot. When you have it working, you can call it whatever you want, I suppose.
how to invest, a novice's guide
GPL is a capitalist tool! :-) Sounds funny, but it really is. Hey, it worked for MySQL, they sold their company for 1.1 Billion!
So, please don't tell me that the GPL is anti-profit.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Does anyone know of a replacement UI project for Blender? Something like Gimpshop is for Gimp? A Blended Maya perhaps? ;)
The Win32 api certainly does accept forward slashes just fine. The problem is appliations and clueless programmers that don't think files ever contain forward slashes. Generally you cannot cut & paste or drag & drop or type in a filename with forward slashes into many applications, and operation system calls like getcwd cannot return strings with forward slashes without them crashing. What I want Microsoft to do is insist that the programs should all accept and work with these, or they don't get the "windows certified" label or something. I am really sick and tired of having to add tons of code to decide whether a piece of text is a filename or not and disabling all possibilities of quoting when it is. I am pretty certain there are plenty of programmers inside Microsoft who would like to fix this as well.
For drive letters, the current syntax would certainly continue to work. I just want an alternative syntax so that "/" can start an unambiguous filename. This would allow the disk structure to be duplicated on a Unix machine so that software can go back & forth. Best suggestion I have heard is to have "/A:/" be the same as "A:/". It would be really nice if readdir() of "/" list these.
MS is just being assholes about the C99 stuff. First of all they ignored the BSD strlcpy and strlcat, which are quite proper solutions. Their "standard" is strcpy_s which *throws an exception* when the buffer overflows. That is just ludricous, what it means is that programs will throw exceptions and cause a DOS rather than just truncating. Really what they are trying to do is force everybody to use Windows-specific calls. Adding underscores to a random set of C99 functions that are safe, especially snprintf, is the real giveaway that they just want to make it impossible to port code.
The C people should realize that we want "N bits" and really don't give a damn about any other considerations. I think C should support "int:22 x" to mean an integer that holds at least 22 bits, with a further guarantee that any power of 2 greater or equal to 8 means *exactly* that many bits. This typedef stuff is nonsense. And both Windows and posix should stop declaring a new foo_t type for every integer in the world, it really does help to know that two of them are the same size and the standards should enforce this by using the same type.