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What Open Source Can Learn From Apple
Linux and open source have long struggled to gain acceptance from the wider (read: non-technical) audience. This has improved in recent years, but still has a long way to go. Columnist Matt Asay suggests that perhaps open source projects should attempt to emulate Apple's design philosophy, with whoever succeeds becoming the "winner" of the hearts and minds of the vast majority of users. "Some projects already accomplish this to some extent. The strength of Mozilla, for example, is that it has figured out how to enable 40 percent of its development to be done by outside contributors, as BusinessWeek recently wrote. The downside is that these contributors are techies, but the upside is that they're techies who add language packs, accessibility features, and other "niche" areas that Mozilla might otherwise struggle to deliver. This suggests a start: enable your open-source project to accept meaningful outside contributions that make the project reflective of a wider development community. But the real goldmine is broadening the definition of "developer" to include lay users of your software. The day that I, as a nontechnical software user, can meaningfully participate in an open-source project is the day that open source will truly have won."
Apple spends a lot of money implementing their design philosophies. Lets face it. It's not cheap to design user friendly high quality UI. Most companies that build open source products aren't serving the Desktop; they're serving the server market. The few that actually are (Ubuntu) are taking Linux and the open source desktop to a higher level.
I am very thankful for Mark Shuttleworth and what he is doing for the Linux Desktop. Everyone knows Redhat flip-flops on the Desktop subject all the time and never actually get much done for it.
This is bullshit. Bad websites are built people who barely know how to use HTML and Javascript, but believe that the more HTML and Javascript you use, the better the website is. Slashdot, Digg, Gizmodo, Endgadget, Facebook, MySpace - they're all fucking horrible. People believe that because Google can pull it off, they can too. They believe that because they have very fast machines, everyone else does too. The believe that "moar interactive" == "awesome website", and that the more iframes you can pull into one page makes it a "mashup" and very "Web 2.0".
Do you see that kind of shit on the Apple website? Of course not! Apple doesn't succeed because of "design", they succeed because they have production values. They don't tolerate "good enough", they don't fixate on technology because it is new, they don't march to the beat of an ideological imperative. They believe in themselves, and they do what they want because they like it, on the assumption that their tastes are like everyone's tastes. Apple does not live by focus groups. Apple doesn't hold "design" over "technology", they hold "simple" over "complicated". The design wankers attach themselves to Apple's coattails because they can't differentiate between pretty technology and well executed technology. They don't understand technology, so they make a religion out of design so their priests can have something to lord over the unfashionable nerds.
Do you know why so much open source software sucks? It's because the programmers suck! They don't measure themselves against any standard of excellence. They stop when something works, ignoring the fact that it doesn't work well. It's plain old slob apathy. They're not getting paid for it, they can't be fired for failure, so what do they care?
"However, users are clueless about what they really want and you can't possibly use them to write the specs of your product!"
This demonstrates the inherent problem with open source's attitude towards user demands. To them you are either (a) a Programmer, or (b) a Grandma.
I'm an IT professional, a power user, and consider myself a connoisseur of good interface design. But I've never coded a line of C++ in my entire life. Does this make my input useless?
For example, I've been trying to get bugs in Thunderbird fixed for a while that seriously impede usability, but the development team doesn't seem to care.
Open source is always talking about how they can win over more users. But how do you win over users if you don't focus on usability?
senior analyist has a paper on her cube wall
There is also this classic product development comic.
Companies that are successful in this field have UI experts -- and the management to back them up -- to say
"Yes, this works adequately, but it looks awful. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but it doesn't blend well with the rest of our product line. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but it's hard to use. Sorry, you can't ship it."
"Yes, this works adequately, but there's too many extraneous features. Sorry, you can't ship it."
(And of course, the ever popular "It was a nice product, but we're abandoning it for something simpler, prettier, and not overburdened with legacy.")
UI guidelines give everyone a place to start talking about the problems (looks/blend/hard/extraneous) and give the development teams a starting point. If there truly is an earth-shattering eye-popping UI feature (a widget) that the guidelines don't allow, then you alter the guidelines after buy in. This *then* requires re-engineering the rest of the applications to account for that great widget and use it where applicable to maintain consistency.
It's expensive and it may seems pointless, but no app is an island when you're trying to engineer a great user-experience.
Linux generally tries to compensate by providing standard frameworks for UI. But there's the I-Love-Standards-There's-So-Many-To-Choose-From problem and that there'll always be the cowboy that turns out a useful app that looks and works different from everything else.
Get off my lawn.
(posting again because somehow my other post turned out all fucked up)
> If we live in a world where a good image manipulating application is overlooked
> because its name is GIMP, there is something wrong with the world.
No, actually it is overlooked because people balk at the terrible interface and go back to Photoshop.
Circumcision is child abuse.