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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."
That's easy, release the source.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Will it Blend?
I'm gonna fucking kill yo... err... how can I help your project?
Does Microsoft blend?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Every year they heat up their branding irons and "reach out" to the cows.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
"Continuing its strategy to fight against FOSS application on the Windows platform, Microsoft mailed the Blender developers asking how they could help improve the user experience on Windows so they could laugh at it. Groklaw puts it in perspective using Steve Ballmer's own words."
There, fixed it for you. Microsoft doesn't want "open sores" (as microsoft shills used to call it), which Ballmer once likened to cancer, on their operating system.
If they could make Windows so it only ran Microsoft programs without losing any Windows sales, they would.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
"Bite my shiny, metal ass."
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
This has been said before but it's in Microsoft's best interest to support FOSS primarily on the Windows platform rather than watch FOSS grow anyway on other OSes.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive" ... that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
here's the thing:
If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not intuitive.
I've used 3D application since the late 80's (started with Sculpt-Animate 4D, and have used *many* applications since), and Blender's interface is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'd say it's worse than ever Caligari (the first version) in that at least with Caligari I could actually navigate.
I tried learning Blender recently, and downloaded a video tutorial. The guy presenting it repeatedly used the word "intuitive" - even going so far as to say something like this:
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
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!
This is a perfect example of:
News is information someone doesn't want you to know.
Everything else is advertising.
"Microsoft is slowly shifting toward a more open standards based approach to its file formats. The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards."
So you're moving towards bribery and pollution of international standards bodies and open mockery of the idea of open and standard formats?
Sorry, but after that I would have told him where he could shove it.
From what I have read of the original posts on the Blender site, it looks like the Blender project will tell Microsoft to go away.
After the OOXML fiasco — Microsoft must truly be deluded to think this is a good example of their openness policy — it is only right that the Blender project, knowing what would happen to them in the end, should reject Microsoft.
1. Get your "Open" standard recognised
2. Get other companies to use your standard
3. ????
4. Profit
But in all seriousness, this is the next logical progression for the OOXML beast. They wouldn't have gone to the trouble of ramrodding OOXML through the standards process if they weren't going to try and leverage it somehow outside of being able to say they have an open standard. Using OOXML would cripple a multi-platform application, but that's not their problem. They've -always- tried to force people into their rut and they've been quite successful at it in the past. I just don't think they "get" that developers aren't going to shoot themselves in the foot by using OOXML.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Which FOSS projects are most vulnerable to this approach? A list of those approached would be interesting.
The thing that gets to me is how can a *proprietary* company ask an *open source* community to help make the *open source* work better on the *proprietary platform*. I mean doesn't that strike people as... stupid? Why not the proprietary company just... *read* the source code for themselves? Don't they have enough money to *hire* developers to work on blender? Why do they think that people who provide their own free time should work to support their *proprietary* platform, which by their own business model is built on charging people for the privilege of using their OS?
What, it's ok for MS to charge people to use their software, but it's not ok to expect MS to shell out some money for other people's software? MS wants the software for free?!?!
They should have done something similar with SoftImage for the time they actually *owned* the company. SoftImage on Windows was a terrible, horrible experience, they clearly simply got it compiled onto Windows and that was it.
I was at an animation shop for awhile where we had both the Windows and SGI version of 3.7 and the Windows version *ran* faster, but crashed a whole lot more. Finally the two guys begged for anything, even Indys, to get their work done.
Finally they sold SoftImage to, was it Avid? I can't remember now. It was clear to us, anyway, that Microsoft simply wanted to show that NT could compete with SGI in heavy-duty graphics work, but they did a terrible, terrible job of it.
That said, both Max and Maya work pretty well (I know, Max was always a Windows-only product), but neither were ever owned by the company who actually wrote the OS.
It is intuitive and efficient IF you take some time to learn it. I know people who work with various 3d applications and blender is just too foreign. Learn Maya and you will know how to work with similiar software. Learn blender and you'll know how to work with blender, and only blender.
It's the start that's the problem, but when you learn it - it is more as just "quite intuitive and efficient".
Result: people might have better experience working with those formats when they use Blender on Windows. -> That would make it more attractive to use Windows as underlying platform (if support for those file formats matter to you).
In other words: give a competitive advantage to using Windows, make it less attractive to move to a FOSS operating system.
This is a message directed towards all people who are not familiar with 3d applications. Most 3d applications have historically had interfaces that deviate from the standard application interface. Get over it.
As someone who has been toying with various 3d applications since 1990 and having taken some time to learn Blender recently I can say this. Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive and effcient. I'm sure it helps that you can access all the functions from the GUI now instead of having to memorize hotkeys.
Keyboard shortcuts often make for a more efficient workflow, but *having* to use them makes for a much steeper learning curve.
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.
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.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I have also been learning to use blender recently, and would agree with you on the efficiency front, but not on the intuitive one - it took me ages to find a decent tutorial (I eventually used the noob to pro wikibook), and without one I was stumped. The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it. The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning.
B.S. With the exception of your mother's nipple, you have never ever used an intuitive interface. There is no such thing. Have you ever seen someone try to "intuit" how to use a mouse without even having seen it being used? "Hello computer?" When you say "intuitive", you merely mean "similar to whatever I'm used to". Frankly, efficiency and discoverability are what you should focus on.
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.
you can dress a pig up in fine clothes and jewelry but underneath it all is still a stinking filthy pig...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Not making it a fscking mission to get your Blender work (sorry, "assets") into XNA's Content Pipeline?
:)
That seems like a good place to start.
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.
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.
The poster you're replying to states 1) he or she has used a wide variety of 3d applications over the past 20 years, and 2) spent effort trying to learn Blender and found it to be lacking in comparison with those other 3d applications. In response you accuse them of already making up their mind based on what they "heard." Did you just not read their reply?
I just don't think most of the people here understand the difference between 'easy to use' and 'easy to learn'. Blender looks like a really interesting tool, but a lot of people have unrealistic expectations for making complex tasks simple. Having used 3ds Max in a production environment for four years, what's 'intuitive' now is far different from what it was when I started.
that isn't "myth preceded" it's "fact preceded". we've been doing a trial of the thing where i work and after 6 months, we largely chucked it as practically all (about a dozen out of the 2 hundred liked the new interface) the test clients couldn't stand it anymore.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it.
The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning. This is a very large and often neglected aspect of learning something as complex and just plain *weird* as 3D modeling and animation: Documentation! Say what you will about the 3ds Max interface (I like it for poly modeling) but the documentation and tutorials are some of the best I've seen for a good introduction to 3D. I found Blender daunting when I last tried it because there really was a shortage of available tutorials and other documentation.
Good documentation will carry a mediocre interface better than poor documentation will carry a great interface.
MS normally reaches out to developers through the paid developer channels. As a result, OSS developers were ignored by Microsoft. Microsoft creates a new position to reach out to them, and contacts them saying, "How can we help? Is there a file format problem? We're working on making our file formats more open, is there something that we can speed up that would help," and you all make snide remarks.
If file formats are not a problem, than a simple, "We're fine for now, but when the issue comes up, I will pass your contact information on to developer with trouble, here's my vCard, let's keep in touch," would be fine.
Microsoft isn't passing any judgment here. Windows competes with Linux in the marketplace, Blender is an application that runs on Windows and Linux, the company that makes Windows reaches out offering to help because they want Blender to run really well on Windows.
It's not about Microsoft WANTING the software for free, the Blender guys GIVE the software away for free, to Microsoft and everyone else. This is simply Microsoft realizing that their competition with Linux and other Open Source PROJECTS doesn't mean that other applications should be supported as well as other third party developers. I'm sure that Microsoft gives Adobe support because they want Adobe products to run as well or better on Windows as Mac OS X, now they are offering support to Blender.
The Blender guys may not need/want that support, but this is Microsoft "getting it," and Slashdot users NOT "getting it." The software marketplace is not proprietary vs. open source, it's not non-Free vs. free, it's product area by product area. I find it unlikely that Microsoft would offer support to the Open Office guys, because OO running better on Windows hurts their market leading Microsoft Office product, but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in, they can offer them support.
I would expect MS to be willing to support The Gimp writers as that program gets better, because Microsoft is indifferent between users running Windows/Photoshop and Windows/Gimp, and would like EITHER scenario better than OSX/Photoshop, OSX/Gimp, or Linux/Gimp.
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
This is called "consistent" not "intuitive".
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.
Will this do?
and
That's just the first two comments.
However the discussion in this thread is about the use of the word "intuitive", which doesn't mean "easy to use". It doesn't even mean "easy to learn" (if an application uses "foo" to mean "yes" and "bar" to mean "no" on its buttons, that's relatively easy to learn, and certainly as easy to use as "yes"/"no", but it's by no means intuitive). An intuitive interface means you can correctly guess most common operations without consulting the manual or online help.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
I've never used Blender and can't comment on whether or not its UI is intuitive. I intend only to reply to your comments about the meaning of "intuitive".
To an extent, I agree with you. However, being "intuitive" doesn't necessarily only mean that it's immediately obvious how to use it. Sometimes your initial perception of the basic UI concept doesn't match that of the developers, but once you shift your perception accordingly, then it become intuitive.
Basically, you may encounter a UI that makes no sense to you. Then you learn how it works, but each time you go to do an action, you have to stop and think about how to do it, and rely on memorized steps. This is not an intuitive interface.
On the other hand, you may encounter a UI that makes no sense to you, but once you grasp the UI's concept, you find that you don't have to rely on memorized steps, they just make sense based on your new understanding of the UI concept. That's a UI that has become intuitive.
In other words, it's intuitive to a person who understands the concept. All you have to do is learn the concept.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein
Yes, I agree, going on their track record and recent statements by Ballmer himself, Microsoft is "reaching out" to Blender, much in the same way that step one to strangling someone is reaching out your hands...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
So very true. And I'm sure Blender is incredibly efficient. What it's *definitely* not is discoverable (at least in my limited experience).
I think you're mixing movie quotes.
"It's a trap!" -- Princess Leia/Admiral Ackbar
"It's a trick. Get an axe." -- Ash
Are you suggesting that nothing has improved since the formation of the FSF in 1985?
how to invest, a novice's guide
Anybody who thinks that Blender is too complicated should probably read up on expert interfaces. Doing 3D modelling is not something you can pick up in a couple hours, or learn in a week even. Expert interfaces are fine on tools like Blender where you would expect the user to be able to devote a large amount of time to learning how the tool works, as long as the time spent learning the tool allows them to do the actual tasks more quickly. Blender is like the CLI. It's not entirely obvious from just messing around how to use it effectively, but to the experienced user, it can be quite powerful.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
LetterRip
Microsoft offered ZERO help to the "open source community." They offered help to the Blender Project to get Blender to run better on Windows. They created a position to reach out to them, because their NORMAL developer channels don't include the free software guys. Microsoft doesn't care about the Open Source community, they care about Microsoft. Microsoft makes money selling Windows and Office. If helping Blender helps them sell Windows and/or Office, they will help Blender. If it does not, they will not help Blender.
Microsoft vs. Sun was obvious, Sun was stupid. Microsoft wanted to sell Windows, that meant making sure that Java apps ran best on Windows. Microsoft wants to sell Windows, so that means making Java apps that run on windows run best (or only) on Windows. Sun wanted to make Windows irrelevant with Java apps. In what universe were Microsoft and Sun's business interests aligned?
There is no "open source community." There are software projects released under Open Source Licenses, and their are "open source projects" that have community developers. There are also corporate projects and University projects that are released under "open source licenses." The only "community" angle is that code under the BSD/MIT licenses are available to everyone, and code under the GPL is available to everyone.
Microsoft doesn't care if you are a corporation or a "community," they care if your software helps them sell software (in which case they help you), or hurts them selling software (in which case they try to crush you). With open source projects, their existing channels don't work for either help/crush, so they have a new position for helping... I'm sure they have another department for crushing competitive open source projects, but that departments send out nastygrams from Legal or FUD from PR, not emails of help from the liaison office.
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.
LetterRip
Why would you limit emacs to three dimensions?
t
>> First of all, I realize that this e-mail was not necessarily about the
>> interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them
>> anyways.
Eh, how does the interface relate to this story? I mean, that was guarenteed to start Yet Another Slashdot Blender UI Flame Fest.
And for you blender UI haters (for the thousandth time) blender's UI is designed to be fast and easy to use, not easy to learn (and it is consistent with itself, yes, just not with other apps). Back when the UI was initially designed, a hotkey-based app was one of the fastest ways to work (pie/radial/marking menus hadn't become popular yet, for that matter they arn't popular now). However it's not particularly easy to learn such an app, especially back before we had header menus so users could at least find the function in the menu and see it's associated hotkey. There's also been significant technical difficulties with the UI code (though there's a project ongoing now to fix that, and hopefully allow much UI improvement).
Maya, (as an example of an app people find easy to learn and fast to use once they learn how to configure it) uses marking menus (basically pie menus) to replace the need to memorize tons of hotkeys. Hotkeys have the advantage of settling into your muscle memory; normals menus do not, nor do icons, but pie menus work fairly well for this. So instead of having tons of hotkeys, you put things into pie menus, which makes the user interface much more discoverable (if done right) and intuitive, especially if users can build their own menus and assign them to custom hotkeys.
Other then the marking menus, I personally think maya's UI is not well designed (it's customizable in the ways as I'd like, for example). However from what I can tell, the marking menus combined with what customizability is there works really well for people. Pie menus have been investigated for use in blender in the past, and will probably be considered again as part of the 2.5 event/ui refactor project.
Joe
Shouldn't that be GNU/three dimensions?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Download Google Sketchup, and you can pick up its basic 3D modelling in an hour. It's by far the easiest 3D modeller I've ever played around with.
Bavarian Purity Law of Rice Krispie Squares: Rice Krispies, Marshmallows, Butter, Vanilla.
You've clearly never seen how much time and effort new mothers put into teaching their babies to breast feed. It's difficult enough that most hospitals offer classes.
I know, I was surprised too.
So much for intuitive interfaces.
Sheesh, who wrote the lead into this story? They sound the baboon taken by Microsoft's orgy of gorillas.
Microsoft has never ever supported open standards and no amount of OOXML will ever support that fact.
Microsoft's attempt is to subvert the true meaning of open source and to beguile and lie to those not smart enough to understand the real reason behind open source.
Microsoft's offerings have been nothing but opened source and that is a universe away from Open Source concepts.
Microsoft is run by a bunch of nuts if they think that we can't see that this is nothing more than their:
embrace, extend, extinguish
tactic.
Their demise won't come soon enough.
In the end open source will meet or exceed any closed source offering. This means that all features, concepts, capabilities will be equal to or better than in the closed source world. What this will relegate Windows to, and there's nothing wrong with it, is a gaming console type application. You'll only use it when and if you want to play games.
The transition to open source is inevitable. The world is far too large and there are too many people that know about how Microsoft does business. Big named companies are now involved. They know how to diffuse the obfuscated veil that Microsoft is draping over the eyes of the average fanboy worshiping at the feet of the criminal monopolist.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The answer is a list of rather simple things, but it is not what they want to hear or expect to hear (I think they expect to hear demands for open source):
#1: Fix filenames and filesystem so they match Unix. This means you use the forward slash. Refuse to "microsoft certify" any software that will not accept a pasted or typed filename with a forward slash in it, and change all the OS api that returns filenames to return forward slashes (probably with a registry setting) and again refuse to "microsoft certify" software that fails when this setting is on. And get rid of the damn drive letters (just make "/A:/" be the same as "A:/") and support UTF-8 encoding of the filenames at all times (probably by changing the "a" version of the win32 api to be hard-coded to UTF-8).
#2: Support OpenGL, meaning that by default you get at least what Mesa provides. Supporting OpenGL 1.4 only is not acceptable.
#3: Support C99 standard functions and don't make your compiler spew a lot of bogus "warnings" that you put in there to try to encourage people to change to your windows-specific functions. Remove the underscores you stuck on lots of the functions so that portable useful code cannot be written.
You got it completely backwards.
It is the GPL license which induced a lot of people to contribute to the Linux kernel instead of a BSD-licensed ... BSD system, which predates Linux by decades.
The fact that because the BSD license did not guarantee that one's contribution will not end up being sold back to the contributor by some greedy fuck, is what turned a majority of contributors away from BSD and other similar licenses. It is why a vast majority of FOSS is licensed under the GPL.
See above. If it were not for GPL, a "most recent" Linux kernel would be still a version 0.6 curiosum found in cob-web covered corners of Usenet and the most widely known Linux-alike system would be BSD with a fraction of a following of today's Linux. It is the GPL which made all the difference. And we have an empirical proof for that: BSD and its forks.
Skipping for the moment the fact that the Linux kernel is developed using the GNU toolchain and that no Linux system can even boot without a whole core set of GNU libraries and tools, it is the GPL which allowed for the growth of Linux. If linux were to be re-licensed to MIT or BSD today, probably (judging by their words on LKML) 80% kernel developers would drop out of the project instantaneously.
Yes! How dare these bastards stop you from taking their shit and selling it for your profit! I mean the chutzpa they have! Lazy unemployed beggars all!
They catch on pretty quickly. But yeah, I was surprised by the need for classes too. Lactation nurse! If you ever meet a male lactation nurse, I hope they've undergone a background check.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
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
M$ "reached out" to JAVA developers way back when, look how well that turned out.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
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.
Microsoft seems to be doing a lot of talking about open source these days, but outside of what they have been required to do by law, their efforts have a hollow ring to them. They don't really want to support open source, what they do want is to bring the productivity of open source products to the windows platform only.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Being a programmer, I find many instances of this type of thing. Your post made me remember the many times I've tried to learn 3D programming (OpenGL or DirectX.) There is a "language" to go with the technology that you have to wrap your head around first. Words like occlusion, voxel, vector (different than a C vector), Stencil Buffer, Tessellation... I could go on. Either way, it would be like telling someone to drive a taxi in Bangladesh if they only spoke English. It might be intuitive to the people living there, but the person you asked to do it wouldn't have a clue where anything was or how to get there.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'm of the opinion that 3D software in general is non-intuitive. Blender took me a long time to figure out. But then I learned Maya, which also took a long time, and now I have forgotten how to use blender. I would hope that 3D apps would at least be similar in how you interact with them. I used to say that Blender is difficult because so many functions are accesed using special key combos or mouse clicks, but I have come to realize that this is just the nature of 3D. Adapting our 2D tools to it just doesn't really make for an intuitive experience.
What I see is that this is going to cause a backlash *against* Blender development for Windows. For those people that do use Blender on Windows, I hope that this doesn't happen. Don't punish the users for MS's interference.
If MS wants to help open source projects, than that is a good thing, but only as long as that support is open (ie. if they share their jewels, they share them with the world, not hidden behind NDAs), and that the projects get to choose how that support is used.
Does anyone know of a replacement UI project for Blender? Something like Gimpshop is for Gimp? A Blended Maya perhaps? ;)
It's interesting to compare this to Microsoft's own research and actual usage data backing the entire redesign effort, which showed several real problems and which led the work.
I'm not all that in love with most other parts of Office 2007, especially not the underlying politics and company guiding the OOXML bullshit and anything-open-has-cooties thinking. But I have read up on how the redesign happened, point by point, and I can't fault them for not doing their homework.
It's a solid piece of engineering and craftsmanship (if you remove the horrendous branding like the "Office button"), but it's hard to judge the merits of the interface based on the first iteration of it, plagued by lack of customization and immense culture shock in anyone who sees it. The application of the interface to the programs might not have worked so well in practice as they thought it would in theory, but I think it's also fairly clear that "stay the course" would not have worked that well for that long.
Agreed, if you saying what I think you saying. People that gripe about Blenders interface are not people that know it; it is all people, imho, that took one look at the simple boxy interface and giant menus, and maybe clicked on the cube with the left mouse button to discover nothing happens, and were immediately turned off, if not outright upset. That was my reaction. Once I finally took the time to learn it (years later after seeing demo videos) other people would watch me work in Blender and would be like WHAT!?! How do you do that? and I would say It is easy, but you must at least watch the interface tutorials (youtube's super3boy tutorials are great for starters, mind you he sounds 12 years old.
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
Thanks for pointing out how important it is not to rush into your comments.
Just because something is GPL doesn't automatically mean that GNU made it.
As I said, many embedded Linux systems contain _no_ GNU tools or libraries. This is nothing to do with BSD, but it _is_ a common misconception, even if it's not what you meant to say.
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20594 Audio book
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
If it results in file incompatibility or rendering differences in between documents from MSWord and those opened by other programs, then it doesn't matter if it is listed as "deprecated" or "optional" or "monkey poo." It still is preventing the interoperability truly open standards are designed to remove.
There are more holes in ODF than OOXML. I'm not terribly fond of OOXML, but frankly they got it more right than ODF has.ODF has a working, open source reference implementation. While the standard as written has a few snags, it's not like developers can't and don't just look to see how OO.org and Workplace did it if there is any question about making sure things are interoperable. OOXML doesn't even have a complete closed source implementation that can be blackbox tested for interoperability. Sorry, OOXML is late to the game and severely lacking in real world ability to seamlessly exchange interoperable documents.
So you've never heard of Drew Barrymore ?
That was supposed to be "Thoughts from England"
The USA was founded on the principal of 'freedom for the individual'. This shows with the USA's weak social welfare systems, and business culture of domination at all cost.
Freedom for the individual, not for business. Thomas Jefferson, the writer and one of the signers of the "Declaration of Independence" and the third President of the USA, even wrote a warning about corporations and the corporate aristocracy: "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."
FalconShould there be a Law?
Lightwave?
For $895 - $995 it should be able to make what I want based on what I'm thinking.
http://shop.newtek.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=7
It's under the File/Save menu, the same as a billion other applications.
If you struggled with that, I'm not surprised you had trouble with using the rest of Blender.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."