The value of consistency is that the default will just work. Consistency allows someone to learn a system. Customization allows them to tailor it to themselves. Both are important. I like being able to set up custom hotkeys in my apps. I also like being able to go to my friends computer and work immediately using hotkeys that have been defined consistently across the user interface.
One of the big UI issues of recent note has been the GNOME Spatial nautilus change. Gnome Developers broke the consistency rule. As a result they angered and confused some of their current users. The issue wasn't really whether or not Spatial nautilus was useable or not it was that the users suddenly had a radical change in a crucial feature of their UI. They would have been better off phasing it in slowly. Make it a feature not turned on by default. Then the first time a user turned on Gnome after upgrading he still felt at home. He could turn it on later but the initial shock of "Whoah!!!! what did you do to my file manager" would have been avoided. Most "users" don't like being shocked or surprised by their applications.
Consistency up front and flexibility can be taken advantage of later.
The real key to Good UI design is consistency. Many open source projects have unfinished features, differing UI conventions and throw the user curve balls. This can be expected for testing and non stable releases. However any release labled stable build or 1.0 and so on should have a clear consistent UI and NO I repeat NO unfinished features.
This alone would help greatly. When a user downloads a stable build binary he should never see a menu that doesn't work or a radically different approach to a task that doesn't fit with the rest of the app. CVS snapshot builds and testing builds are a different ballgame.
Also Stable builds need to be clearly marked as such and stressed as the "polished" version.
Geez, If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say that I could pay the fines for every music downloader out there. I mean seriously where are your substantiating facts for that statement?
I was homeschooled. Many of my friends were homeschooled. Statistically speaking Homeschooled childern come our better socially adjusted than public school kids. Anyway that's just my two cents.
here's some of those statistics by the way just so you can see I'm not speaking out of my tush.
#1#2
People often misidentify websites as the Killer App of the future. Actually Thin Client's are more that type of thing. A server serves an application to a client. The browser may be the client platform or it may be some other new development. The Point, is that once the protocol for serving the application is public it can be implemented on any client platform.
That's why HTML is available pretty well everywhere. I don't think HTML (as it is now) is going to be the protocol used but I do think something will fill that need. I just hope there is enough of a unified standard available that we don't have to have a ton of client platforms for all the applications.
Some stuff is going to stay "rich client". 3D-apps for instance. But even those will probably evolve to use those same protocols to communicate with a server for collaborative work. A sort of medium client application model.
Being a contributor and hanging out with the Primary Dev's I can reassure you that the Rendering engine is still a high priority. Not to mention the new emphasis on Yafray integration. I doubt you will have to worry about this being neglected.
did he completely gloss over the fact that even when you buy a box distro off the shelf you can install it on as many systems as you want with no licensing issues? Two things drive the business user's interest in Open Source. Price and Licensing. He "sort of" addressed pricing but totally ignored Licensing.
Maybe not but as I say in my rebuttal
ACME GPU/Linxu probably won't be in business long. Someone in the Open Source Community will notice the Binary doesn't jive with the all the other Apache's out there. maybe that it has differences from the compiled binaries they have used. Peer Review is Very Powerful even in that kind of circumstance I think. One additional benefit to Open Source is the existence of clean Binaries out there to compare unknowns against.
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The value of consistency is that the default will just work. Consistency allows someone to learn a system. Customization allows them to tailor it to themselves. Both are important. I like being able to set up custom hotkeys in my apps. I also like being able to go to my friends computer and work immediately using hotkeys that have been defined consistently across the user interface.
One of the big UI issues of recent note has been the GNOME Spatial nautilus change. Gnome Developers broke the consistency rule. As a result they angered and confused some of their current users. The issue wasn't really whether or not Spatial nautilus was useable or not it was that the users suddenly had a radical change in a crucial feature of their UI. They would have been better off phasing it in slowly. Make it a feature not turned on by default. Then the first time a user turned on Gnome after upgrading he still felt at home. He could turn it on later but the initial shock of "Whoah!!!! what did you do to my file manager" would have been avoided. Most "users" don't like being shocked or surprised by their applications.
Consistency up front and flexibility can be taken advantage of later.
The real key to Good UI design is consistency. Many open source projects have unfinished features, differing UI conventions and throw the user curve balls. This can be expected for testing and non stable releases. However any release labled stable build or 1.0 and so on should have a clear consistent UI and NO I repeat NO unfinished features.
This alone would help greatly. When a user downloads a stable build binary he should never see a menu that doesn't work or a radically different approach to a task that doesn't fit with the rest of the app. CVS snapshot builds and testing builds are a different ballgame.
Also Stable builds need to be clearly marked as such and stressed as the "polished" version.
Geez, If I had a penny for every time I heard someone say that I could pay the fines for every music downloader out there. I mean seriously where are your substantiating facts for that statement? I was homeschooled. Many of my friends were homeschooled. Statistically speaking Homeschooled childern come our better socially adjusted than public school kids. Anyway that's just my two cents. here's some of those statistics by the way just so you can see I'm not speaking out of my tush. #1 #2
People often misidentify websites as the Killer App of the future. Actually Thin Client's are more that type of thing. A server serves an application to a client. The browser may be the client platform or it may be some other new development. The Point, is that once the protocol for serving the application is public it can be implemented on any client platform. That's why HTML is available pretty well everywhere. I don't think HTML (as it is now) is going to be the protocol used but I do think something will fill that need. I just hope there is enough of a unified standard available that we don't have to have a ton of client platforms for all the applications. Some stuff is going to stay "rich client". 3D-apps for instance. But even those will probably evolve to use those same protocols to communicate with a server for collaborative work. A sort of medium client application model.
Being a contributor and hanging out with the Primary Dev's I can reassure you that the Rendering engine is still a high priority. Not to mention the new emphasis on Yafray integration. I doubt you will have to worry about this being neglected.
I feel vindicated :-)
I occasionally contribute to the Blender codebase and use it so I also know what I am talking about.
Their is complete documentation for the 2.3x release available in several formats: http://www.blender3d.org/cms/Using_Blender.80.0.ht ml
did he completely gloss over the fact that even when you buy a box distro off the shelf you can install it on as many systems as you want with no licensing issues? Two things drive the business user's interest in Open Source. Price and Licensing. He "sort of" addressed pricing but totally ignored Licensing.
Maybe not but as I say in my rebuttal ACME GPU/Linxu probably won't be in business long. Someone in the Open Source Community will notice the Binary doesn't jive with the all the other Apache's out there. maybe that it has differences from the compiled binaries they have used. Peer Review is Very Powerful even in that kind of circumstance I think. One additional benefit to Open Source is the existence of clean Binaries out there to compare unknowns against.