Dude! You are taking things way to seriously. I don't take software seriously when I'm not getting paid to write it. I use whatever software gets the job done and some software is worth paying for. Stop getting all worked up about Open Source software and all that GNU crap. It's really not worth getting mad about.
Do you want to get worked up about something? How about government corruption, crime, poverty or pollution?
I'm enjoying my time off from work but I assume that you are at work posting on slashdot. Get back to work before you boss sees you and stop ragging on me for having some fun in the afternoon on my day off. I did not have internet while I was visiting family over the Christmas holidays.
Can you change the space time continuum to give people like me more time per week? I've already got a 40+ hour developer job and a hobby as a vocalist. I don't have the time or energy to write software on my own time.
There is more to life than software. I'd rather go home from a bar/club with some hot chick than sit in front of a keyboard coding on my time off.
I cannot post links to any programs that I've written designed because all my programs belong to my employer and they are not accessible to the general public.
What I can tell you though is that my UI's are scrutinized by project champions, end users (through UAT sessions) and our internal QA department.
There is one online project that I was involved with a few years ago but I cannot post a link to that either since they have change it so much over the years since I was involved because of changing corporate colours/branding.
At home, I use programs which I find usable. I don't use any other criteria such as whether it is GPL'ed or not. I use desktop backgrounds that I like and some of them were created by me but I don't discriminate.
Does Photoshop? Or did designers just get used to Photoshop's way of doing things?
Most commercial programs are laid out in a similar matter. Prior to using Photoshop, I used Deluxe Paint I-IV on the Amiga, MacPaint, Corel Draw and Paintshop Pro. I had no problem getting up to speed with Photoshop. PS is by no means perfect but they do manage to group functions and features quite intuitively. The developers of Gimp need to work on that problem in their program.
I use the GIMP at home and recently took a class which used Photoshop (rather, that's what they have on the machines.) I struggled (ok, exaggerating a bit,) to do some seemingly simple functions in PS; searching around for that button or option to do my bidding. I was too used to the GIMP.
Which proves what exactly? That you were used to a GIMP after using it so much? Just because you can eventually learn a bad UI, it does not mean that it is intuitive. Windows is a prime example of this. If Windows was easy to use, there would not be this huge market for video tutorials to use windows for beginners.
Prior to the GIMP, I used to use Graphic Converter on my old computer, and in that switch I hit a speedbump. I was then too used to GC's way of doing things.
Graphics converter is just an overgrown Image converter. It was never designed to be an image editor.
Is the GIMP really bad? Or does it just suffer the flaw of it's not Photoshop. Like some scorn Macs because all they've ever known is Windows.
No, it suffers to the flaw of trying to be different for it's own sake rather than following defacto-standards and conventions in graphics programs.
As a corporate windows user who was an Amiga user before that and a mac user in school, I recognized that I knew how to use windows because of years of experience rather that it being intuitive to use. I had no problem switching to OS X.
No worries, the commercial competitor Photoshop is even more unintuitive. I had to use it for fixing some b/w photos the other day, but I can't even change between different images using alt+tab on Windows and I really can't use the UI either. For me it's not less pretty than Photoshop either, not slower, has the features I need, so it's very much not crappy.
Did you try the window menu? As for your tabbing between windows, I don't know if it works with the windows MDI version but on the mac version, I can use Ctrl-Tab to cycle through windows.
Regardless, your complaint is a straw man as you are complaining about your OS's windowing controls and your lack of experience with them. I assume that the key combination for cycling through windows in an MDI window would be the same in any MDI program.
Do you have any actual photoshop specific problems?
That a great copout. Let's say that you decide to build your own house. Are you going to do a half-assed job in building it or are you going to take pride in your work? Would you be afraid to hire experts to help you build it where you lack knowledge or skill in a certain area? Why should software be any different? Wouldn't it be far more enjoyable for the developers to use themselves if they put a little effort in?
Could it be that these developers do not realize how lacking they are in UI design and they do not realize how craptastic it really is? I certainly hope that they have not turned away volunteer UI experts because of issues of pride. If they were offered help from UI experts, they should jump at the chance to have help from people who know what they are doing.
It's just not corporate looking. And that's why it's actually likable.
Enough of the canned anti-corporate rhetoric already. These programs are used by creative types in all sorts of organizations including corporations. But let us be clear about this, the corporations have absolutely nothing to do with the creative process. All they do is pay the bills for acquiring the programs whether that be through download bandwidth or purchases.
If they are trying to attract only the teen/highschool demographic, I think they did a great job. However, if they were trying to look like a credible alternative to photoshop for adult amateurs or professionals, they failed miserably.
I don't work as an artist for my employer but I have enough experience as an amateur artist/photographer to see that it looks like crap. It would be likeable if it was made by some teen for his school project but I assumed they were looking for branding for The GIMP to bring it some more credibility among graphics program users.
I believe what the parent is trying to say is that a lot of open source software (cross-platform or linux specific) has major usability issues and looks absolutely horrible. We are not living in the 1990's anymore people. Just because your software is open source, it does not mean you should do a halfassed job. Take pride in your work or don't bother doing it at all.
Take a look at Open Source software on OS X. That software usually follows the UI guidelines of OSX. It does not take too much extra effort to provide an OS specific UI for each OS you are targeting and OS X provides great tools for keeping your UI and engine code separate in the form of Interface builder and the.nib files.
Why does GIMP rely on GTK and X-Windows? I don't call that proper cross platform development. You imposing too many prerequisites on the end users of the software. Either use Java exclusively or provide a native UI for each target platform. With the latter approach, you are more likely to end up with clean and highly portable code that you migrate to any future platform that may arise in the future.
Uh, no. The current Gimp may have feature parity with Photoshop 5.0. You either heard your friend wrong or you are both delusional.
Regardless, it still does not have usability parity with Photoshop 5.0 which to me is far more important than how many features you have. I have never taken a course or read any books on Photoshop but I can quickly figure out how to do most tasks in PS without any difficulty.
The only thing Gimp has going for it is price but we should all remember the old adage: "You get what you pay for".
Most companies do not distinguish between contractors and employees. The contractors at my workplace are issued the same swipe cards as everyone else working there.
I think everyone assumes larger corporations like MSFT have a more rigid organizational structure. This is not news.
I call bullshit. You claim to have experience with various languages and platforms but your example shows your ignorance of Cocoa and the true power it offers. You also harp on about the the qualities of the IDE. Do you lean on your IDE like a crutch? Have you used VS 2005? It is not very stable and very buggy.
How about an example involving a To do list application with saving enabled written in.NET and Cocoa utilizing Core Data. Which one will be easier to implement? Which one is easier to deploy? Have fun getting all your users to install the right version of the framework.
Have you ever written a multi-tiered data centric enterprise level app? Have you ever observed it in production? The non-deterministic approach to garbage collection can quickly bring a large server to its knees forcing frequent app server restarts. In the real world production environment,.NET is not the panacea some of you seem to think it is.
I have news for my fellow developers, if it is not broke, don't fix it. Another observation is that just because.NET may appear to you to be the best solution as a developer, it does not necessarily mean that it is the best solution to the business need you are all paid to fulfil. Stop trying to push the latest and greatest technology fads in your IT shops without considering whether it will perform well and provide more business value than other solutions.
It seems to me that most of my fellow developers in the world seem to completely ignore the promotion to production phase or real world performance when developing a solution because most of them have never worked in internal IT support. I worked in IT Support prior to moving to the development department. I feel that it has helped me immensely in my relationship with the Support and Sys Admin departments and as Programmer Analyst. When creating a technical design for a new product or feature to an existing product, production performance is one of my key design considerations in addition to user friendliness.
The.NET platform is far from perfect. There are numerous performance issues with the non-deterministic garbage collection. The delay of the release of various resources can cause a huge performance hit over time forcing a periodic shutdown and restart of the app server.
I've also noticed people praising.NET for having a choice of languages. Excuse me? All of the CLR languages offer the same bloody features as C#, so what is the point of using any of the other languages other than familiarity? Using.NET can be quite limiting in actual use.
The suggestion that Cocoa can only be programmed against with Objective C is a myth. There are numerous languages that you can use and you can also mix Cocoa and regular C/C++/Python/Ruby etc... within your application. Numerous open source ports are examples of standard C code being called by Objective C interface code.
With the majority of cross-platform software, you can get away with using very little Cocoa in you application if you program your engine code separate from your UI and OS specific code.
Or, in the real world consider it might actually be important and if you're that thin skinned maybe you need to stay home in your bubble. See it works both ways.
Are you as much of an asshole in real life? I hope not or you could end up getting the shit kicked out of you by the security guard when you are asked to leave and put up that kind of attitude.
Theatres are private establishments with their own rules. If you don't like their rules, you can take a hike.
You must be one of those idiotic Americans that everyone hates so much. You give your fellow countrymen a bad name.
You do have a right to talk but that does not include disturbing other people with your cellphone conversations in a movie theatre during the show. You also have freedom of speech but that does not mean you can yell "fire" in a crowded theatre either.
That's wonderful to hear. Don't give Caspian much credance.
Most of the people I work with in IT are married and many of us have interests outside of IT like music for example. We have several people who are musicians and I happen to be a vocalist. Singing is something I enjoy because of how it makes me feel and how it affects the emotions of others.
I think we need more women in IT because quite frankly, most of my fellow males tend to have one track minds whereas women can think both linearly and non-linearly. I find it to be quite refreshing when I work with a female collegue on a project compared to guys who cannot grasp the big picture or visualize several alternative approaches at the same time. Brainstorming is a lot of fun.
I don't think men are born with these one track minds but rather many of them are trained to think that way from an early age. I was encouraged to be creative and to use my imagination. Part of this stemmed from growing up poor in a rural area. We did not have money for the latest toys and there were very few children my age around where I lived so I ended up making friends with girls mostly.
Err.. no. I visited the example page, and found my browser memory usage jumped up by 45Mb, it suddenly began consuming all available CPU cycles and became totally unresponsive. I had to kill the process to close the page.
What OS and browser are you using? It works fine here on Safari 2.x and OS X Tiger. How much memory do you have that you have to check how much memory it is using?
You want people to buy a windows PC just so they can use those services? I can "explore" music using the "radio" feature in iTunes as well as the previews in iTMS for free. Free is cheaper.
Well Napster and the other WMA based stores require windows. As a mac user, I would have to purchase a PC, a windows license and a compatible portable player. That is an awfully large financial barrier to me being a customer of Napster or MSN music.
Now consider a windows user who wants to use the iTMS, all he has to do is buy an iPod. That is a much smaller investment and disruption of your chosen computing environment than with those WMA store and players. If I wanted to switch back to windows or if a windows user wanted to switch to the mac, all of the purchases made by on ITMS would be completely accessible on the new platform. The same cannot be said about DRMed WMA files.
Given the choice of platform lock-in or portable music player lock-in, I would choose the latter.
As a lead developer of Audacity, I have to disagree. Yes, users want a simplified interface that doesn't get in their way. They want the most basic things to be as easy as possible. But once they've done those basic things, they want to do something else.
Why are you making that assumption? Why do you feel the need to expose that functionality in the interface or in a settings dialogue? The very definition of "user interface" is to provide a way to interact with software for the average user. This definition of user does not include enthusiasts or developers.
If you really want to expose more functionality, do it in a well documented API allowing others to create third-party add-ons or plugins. That is the sensible approach rather than offering everything alacarte to ever user.
Part of the problem with linux software in general is that it is written and designed by developers for developers rather than users.
Interface clutter in the main UI or in settings dialogues is the bane of usability on both windows and linux.
Concerning illness, Jesus very clearly said that people do not become ill because of sin or die in accidents because of sin. He also rejected the concept that people born with defects were born that way because of the sin of their parents. Go read the gospels as it is in there plain as day. He rebuked people who made such assumptions.
Why don't you take the time to learn about the faith before criticizing it?
Slashdot Mirror
Do you want to get worked up about something? How about government corruption, crime, poverty or pollution?
I'm enjoying my time off from work but I assume that you are at work posting on slashdot. Get back to work before you boss sees you and stop ragging on me for having some fun in the afternoon on my day off. I did not have internet while I was visiting family over the Christmas holidays.
There is more to life than software. I'd rather go home from a bar/club with some hot chick than sit in front of a keyboard coding on my time off.
What I can tell you though is that my UI's are scrutinized by project champions, end users (through UAT sessions) and our internal QA department.
There is one online project that I was involved with a few years ago but I cannot post a link to that either since they have change it so much over the years since I was involved because of changing corporate colours/branding.
At home, I use programs which I find usable. I don't use any other criteria such as whether it is GPL'ed or not. I use desktop backgrounds that I like and some of them were created by me but I don't discriminate.
What exactly does this have to do with UI design?
Most commercial programs are laid out in a similar matter. Prior to using Photoshop, I used Deluxe Paint I-IV on the Amiga, MacPaint, Corel Draw and Paintshop Pro. I had no problem getting up to speed with Photoshop. PS is by no means perfect but they do manage to group functions and features quite intuitively. The developers of Gimp need to work on that problem in their program.
I use the GIMP at home and recently took a class which used Photoshop (rather, that's what they have on the machines.) I struggled (ok, exaggerating a bit,) to do some seemingly simple functions in PS; searching around for that button or option to do my bidding. I was too used to the GIMP.
Which proves what exactly? That you were used to a GIMP after using it so much? Just because you can eventually learn a bad UI, it does not mean that it is intuitive. Windows is a prime example of this. If Windows was easy to use, there would not be this huge market for video tutorials to use windows for beginners. Prior to the GIMP, I used to use Graphic Converter on my old computer, and in that switch I hit a speedbump. I was then too used to GC's way of doing things.
Graphics converter is just an overgrown Image converter. It was never designed to be an image editor.
Is the GIMP really bad? Or does it just suffer the flaw of it's not Photoshop. Like some scorn Macs because all they've ever known is Windows.
No, it suffers to the flaw of trying to be different for it's own sake rather than following defacto-standards and conventions in graphics programs.
As a corporate windows user who was an Amiga user before that and a mac user in school, I recognized that I knew how to use windows because of years of experience rather that it being intuitive to use. I had no problem switching to OS X.
Did you try the window menu? As for your tabbing between windows, I don't know if it works with the windows MDI version but on the mac version, I can use Ctrl-Tab to cycle through windows.
Regardless, your complaint is a straw man as you are complaining about your OS's windowing controls and your lack of experience with them. I assume that the key combination for cycling through windows in an MDI window would be the same in any MDI program.
Do you have any actual photoshop specific problems?
Could it be that these developers do not realize how lacking they are in UI design and they do not realize how craptastic it really is? I certainly hope that they have not turned away volunteer UI experts because of issues of pride. If they were offered help from UI experts, they should jump at the chance to have help from people who know what they are doing.
Enough of the canned anti-corporate rhetoric already. These programs are used by creative types in all sorts of organizations including corporations. But let us be clear about this, the corporations have absolutely nothing to do with the creative process. All they do is pay the bills for acquiring the programs whether that be through download bandwidth or purchases.
If they are trying to attract only the teen/highschool demographic, I think they did a great job. However, if they were trying to look like a credible alternative to photoshop for adult amateurs or professionals, they failed miserably.
I don't work as an artist for my employer but I have enough experience as an amateur artist/photographer to see that it looks like crap. It would be likeable if it was made by some teen for his school project but I assumed they were looking for branding for The GIMP to bring it some more credibility among graphics program users.
Wow. I'd have to say that was the best of the bunch. They definitely should have gone with that one.
Take a look at Open Source software on OS X. That software usually follows the UI guidelines of OSX. It does not take too much extra effort to provide an OS specific UI for each OS you are targeting and OS X provides great tools for keeping your UI and engine code separate in the form of Interface builder and the .nib files.
Why does GIMP rely on GTK and X-Windows? I don't call that proper cross platform development. You imposing too many prerequisites on the end users of the software. Either use Java exclusively or provide a native UI for each target platform. With the latter approach, you are more likely to end up with clean and highly portable code that you migrate to any future platform that may arise in the future.
Regardless, it still does not have usability parity with Photoshop 5.0 which to me is far more important than how many features you have. I have never taken a course or read any books on Photoshop but I can quickly figure out how to do most tasks in PS without any difficulty.
The only thing Gimp has going for it is price but we should all remember the old adage: "You get what you pay for".
I think everyone assumes larger corporations like MSFT have a more rigid organizational structure. This is not news.
How about an example involving a To do list application with saving enabled written in .NET and Cocoa utilizing Core Data. Which one will be easier to implement? Which one is easier to deploy? Have fun getting all your users to install the right version of the framework.
Have you ever written a multi-tiered data centric enterprise level app? Have you ever observed it in production? The non-deterministic approach to garbage collection can quickly bring a large server to its knees forcing frequent app server restarts. In the real world production environment, .NET is not the panacea some of you seem to think it is.
I have news for my fellow developers, if it is not broke, don't fix it. Another observation is that just because .NET may appear to you to be the best solution as a developer, it does not necessarily mean that it is the best solution to the business need you are all paid to fulfil. Stop trying to push the latest and greatest technology fads in your IT shops without considering whether it will perform well and provide more business value than other solutions.
It seems to me that most of my fellow developers in the world seem to completely ignore the promotion to production phase or real world performance when developing a solution because most of them have never worked in internal IT support. I worked in IT Support prior to moving to the development department. I feel that it has helped me immensely in my relationship with the Support and Sys Admin departments and as Programmer Analyst. When creating a technical design for a new product or feature to an existing product, production performance is one of my key design considerations in addition to user friendliness.
I've also noticed people praising .NET for having a choice of languages. Excuse me? All of the CLR languages offer the same bloody features as C#, so what is the point of using any of the other languages other than familiarity? Using .NET can be quite limiting in actual use.
The suggestion that Cocoa can only be programmed against with Objective C is a myth. There are numerous languages that you can use and you can also mix Cocoa and regular C/C++/Python/Ruby etc... within your application. Numerous open source ports are examples of standard C code being called by Objective C interface code.
With the majority of cross-platform software, you can get away with using very little Cocoa in you application if you program your engine code separate from your UI and OS specific code.
Are you as much of an asshole in real life? I hope not or you could end up getting the shit kicked out of you by the security guard when you are asked to leave and put up that kind of attitude.
Theatres are private establishments with their own rules. If you don't like their rules, you can take a hike.
You must be one of those idiotic Americans that everyone hates so much. You give your fellow countrymen a bad name.
So they are more like Daleks then.
You do have a right to talk but that does not include disturbing other people with your cellphone conversations in a movie theatre during the show. You also have freedom of speech but that does not mean you can yell "fire" in a crowded theatre either.
Repeating the same fallacy will not make it any more true.
I think it was. :)
Most of the people I work with in IT are married and many of us have interests outside of IT like music for example. We have several people who are musicians and I happen to be a vocalist. Singing is something I enjoy because of how it makes me feel and how it affects the emotions of others.
I think we need more women in IT because quite frankly, most of my fellow males tend to have one track minds whereas women can think both linearly and non-linearly. I find it to be quite refreshing when I work with a female collegue on a project compared to guys who cannot grasp the big picture or visualize several alternative approaches at the same time. Brainstorming is a lot of fun.
I don't think men are born with these one track minds but rather many of them are trained to think that way from an early age. I was encouraged to be creative and to use my imagination. Part of this stemmed from growing up poor in a rural area. We did not have money for the latest toys and there were very few children my age around where I lived so I ended up making friends with girls mostly.
*SIGH*. That is what the MMC interface is for on your client machine. You don't need to log onto the server.
What OS and browser are you using? It works fine here on Safari 2.x and OS X Tiger. How much memory do you have that you have to check how much memory it is using?
You want people to buy a windows PC just so they can use those services? I can "explore" music using the "radio" feature in iTunes as well as the previews in iTMS for free. Free is cheaper.
Now consider a windows user who wants to use the iTMS, all he has to do is buy an iPod. That is a much smaller investment and disruption of your chosen computing environment than with those WMA store and players. If I wanted to switch back to windows or if a windows user wanted to switch to the mac, all of the purchases made by on ITMS would be completely accessible on the new platform. The same cannot be said about DRMed WMA files.
Given the choice of platform lock-in or portable music player lock-in, I would choose the latter.
Why are you making that assumption? Why do you feel the need to expose that functionality in the interface or in a settings dialogue? The very definition of "user interface" is to provide a way to interact with software for the average user. This definition of user does not include enthusiasts or developers.
If you really want to expose more functionality, do it in a well documented API allowing others to create third-party add-ons or plugins. That is the sensible approach rather than offering everything alacarte to ever user.
Part of the problem with linux software in general is that it is written and designed by developers for developers rather than users.
Interface clutter in the main UI or in settings dialogues is the bane of usability on both windows and linux.
Why don't you take the time to learn about the faith before criticizing it?