It's a hell of a lot easier then, then doing it after the bad UI is already in-place.
this whole thing started as a university project, if the devs had started with usability testing there would be no gimp for you to whine about.
For all practical purposes, there's no GIMP for me to whine about now. Since the UI is so rotten it's unusable, the product might as well not exist at all as far as I'm concerned.
your entire post is based on the premise that the gimp developers somehow owe you for using their software,
Of course not, it's based on the (possibly incorrect) assumption that the GIMP developers want to make good software that people find helpful. If their goal is to make bad software, well, cheers.
(BTW i fucking hate the ribbon (i've started learning keyboard shortcuts just so i know where stuff is, i guess you can call that more efficient) but i have no real issues with the gimp interface, maybe it's more subjective than you think?)
Like I just said, 'like' and 'dislike' aren't really factors in UI design.
If they had usability tested two alternatives, and both alternatives were equally usable, then, yes, selecting between the two would subjective. But that's not what they did.
my point was that if *you* were building an app and the interface worked the way you wanted it too then a bunch of people whined it didn't work how they wanted, would you be excited at this new opportunity to make it into an app with an interface you don't like or just tell them to fix it themselves?
I'd do the usability testing before I made any kind of UI at all, thus ensuring that the UI I did make had been studied intently, and was likely to please all users of my software.
But that's because I'm a software developer, and not a egotistic hack.
What the GIMP team should have done was swallowed their pride, then performed unbiased testing of their product. If the testing showed that their interface was superior, than good for them! But they didn't even attempt to test it, they just pig-headedly decreed that it was already superior.
Saying "fix it yourself" is retarded for several reasons: 1) The developers are entrusted with making a GUI that doesn't suck; that's part of their job that you can't shovel off to someone else. 2) End-users by-and-large don't know *how* to fix it themselves, and the rare few who do likely don't have the time to learn a large new codebase. 3) The developers themselves would have also benefited from a truly better UI, if they would swallow their pride long enough to create one.
(BTW 'like' and 'dislike' have very little place in UI design. Most people who dislike the Office 2007 interface are still measurably more efficient with it then when using Office 2003.)
We're not recharging. We're replacing, it's going to be in the bumper or something else standardized and a machine will switch it out in seconds.
No thanks! Worn-out and cheaply-made batteries explode... you're sure as hell not putting some other idiot's battery in my car at a service station. If your charging solution doesn't work with the battery I already own, it's no solution.
How would you feel if every time you bought gas, your tires got rotated out with the topmost set on a giant pile? Would you feel safe?
So when you encounter an article entitled, 'Is Twitter Censoring Wikileaks Trends?', what, pray-tell did you expect to find within it, exactly?
The usual Slashdot pattern is: 1) "Editor" posts ridiculously biased, or flat-out wrong, article 2) First few comments correct article
But when they post conspiracy theories, we get: 1) "Editor" posts ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theory pretending to be a legitimate article 2) First few comments trip over themselves not only justifying the conspiracy theory, but trying to expand it in new off-topic directions
So I guess, while you're generally correct, my only mistake is thinking that Slashdot comments would correct ridiculous conspiracy theories the same way they correct biased/wrong articles.
Therefore your position can be summed up, in it's complete context, as:
Because Twitter isn't attacking Wikileaks, anyone (on slashdot) who believes that Wikileaks is under attack is paranoid.
First of all, nobody (well, except you) is making the claim that Twitter is "attacking" Wikileaks-- where did that ridiculous little nugget of nonsense come from?
Secondly, my message is more along the lines of: "Because Twitter isn't censoring Wikileaks, people who believe Twitter is censoring Wikileaks are paranoid." That seems like pretty solid reasoning to me.
Whatever people think about *other* activities that may or may not be occurring against Wikileaks is off-topic, and therefore I'm not addressing those.
And yet here you are, in this comment, calling people names.
I didn't call anybody names. But I will now: BobMcD is a moron who can't read plain English.
If your position is the more reasonable one, why the passion in your response?
Because I'm sick of having to read paranoid rantings modded-up in every single goddamned story. The majority of the people here can't be paranoid nutbags, right? Then why are they getting modded-up? (OMG, I just made a paranoid conspiracy theory!!! They're out to get me!)
Besides, it isn't as if twitter would be the only thing Wikileaks has had to worry about over the last year or so. Or, what, if trends start to appear then Assange would be free to travel to the US again?
What? I have no idea what point you're trying to make...
Please just note how by dismissing a single element of what some perceive to be an alarming trend you have DISMISSED THE ENTIRE SITUATION as paranoia.
By "single element" do you mean Wikileaks not showing up on Twitter's Trending Topics list? The thing this topic is about? Am I reading this right? You're actually chiding me for being on-topic?
Please read the article. The statistics indicate there are way more people tweeting about wikileaks than are tweeting about the currently trending topics. It's about 3 times more popular than the top trends.
And yet I have no idea how the "trending topics" are determined, nor does the article writer seem to know. Considering the change they made to it a little while ago, I wouldn't be surprised if "total amount of traffic" isn't a big factor at all, since the entire point of the change was to de-list topics that *always* had a high amount of traffic.
I hate to break this to you, but I can't remember jack I learned during my "second last year" (???) in high school. Hell, most of college is a blur, too. (Yes, I know, you post on Slashdot so you must have an amazing ROBOT MIND, but maybe your amazing ROBOT MIND can conceive of the notion that maybe, just maybe, some people forget some stuff they learned decades ago.)
When do students learn what the English construct "second last year" means in this context? Because I certainly haven't been exposed to that yet.
You're just rephrasing exactly what I said. So... thanks for the contribution?
If the developers would have actually done *gasp* usability testing, there's no doubt they would have found that the vast majority of people considered the product confusing to the point of broken. They just couldn't be arsed to do actual testing, but they "obviously" were so right about it. You don't need "interface customization" code if your UI doesn't suck shit, so the fact that people brought that up is another clue they should have taken.
The most disgusting part of all of this is that you went through the effort of creating a new game, including (according to your post) re-creating all the graphics and sounds, and yet you didn't inject a single original idea. Even if you're not in the wrong legally (although I believe you are), you're a completely hack.
If I were you, I'd be ashamed of myself. All you've done is demonstrated to the world how bankrupt your creative vision is.
Yes, and here's why: 1) Many people here are defending him (spite is one of my most powerful motivators) 2) I like video games, and I like playing video games, and I want to play new video games. Every ripoff this guy makes is an original game that never happened, because he was too scared to try something new. Fuck that noise.
In fact, some fan based derived games have been accepted by the publishers (ie Capcom and MegaMan2D).
That's a choice they make. Namco has not made that choice.
So, in effect, Namco can claim that smashing small profitless indie endeavors such as "Super Pac" is how they keep a bigger company from making a Pacman game.
Or they could simply be "smashing" a small, profitless indie endeavor that blatantly ripped-off their game. Occam's Razor.
What Namco doesn't see (and what Capcom does) is that the people making and even playing these copies are fans of Pacman.
Ok? Yet so irrelevant.
I know this much is true, "Super Pac" played better than the official Namco Pacman Android app. So, continue to "cheer Namco on".
The game that crashed after level 3? You're a lair.
Even though millions of people need a little photo editing they aren't funding GIMP and the professionals rather end up paying for Photoshop, same goes for OpenOffice vs MS Office.
Yah, but GIMP alienated a *lot* of potential fans when they bull-headedly refused to even consider fixing their horribly-broken UI years ago. I'd consider them a special-case.
OpenOffice, though, just has the issue that it's bloated, slow, and not-very-compatible. The optimist in me says that with a few more years of development, it could massacre MS Office sales. The realist in me says "well they've been in this position for years now, and it's still bloated, slow, and not-very-compatible." So...
I think what you call "anti copyright bias" is just plain common sense in most cases. Nintendo or whoever they are have made a shedload of cash from a single creative event that happened about 30 years ago. They then "rewrote" this idea numerous times and re-sold it because the copyright system allowed them to, and will allow them to pretty much for ever.
How about limiting the TIME of copyright to about 10 years so that people can rip mix and burn stuff to their heart's content, just like they used to a few hundred years ago?
People are already doing that, though. Super Meat Boy and Braid are two recent examples of games that benefit *a lot* from Nintendo's inventions, but they are allowed to exist just fine. Why? Well, because while they benefit from Nintendo's work, they don't flat-out copy it... this guy? He flat-out copied Pac-Man.
Look at the screenshot on his site. If you "draw it yourself to look like the original", and it turns out *pixel for pixel* to be identical to the original, how does that differ from copying? We're not dealing with a Van Gogh painting here; we're dealing with a computer graphic composed of limited amounts of pixels.
Well, seriously. The art is so identical that there's *no way to tell* whether it was simply copied (copyright), or re-created but looks suspiciously similar (trademark). Seriously, click through to his site and look at the screenshots... if his version of Pac-Man had a round mouth instead of a triangle, or was colored purple and had an eye on a stalk or something, well, ok. But in this case, I'm kind of cheering Namco on.
Most people still use the email client that came with their machine, which equates to some form of Windows / outlook stuff, which shows images by default.
Outlook, and Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail block images by default. Outlook has for years (decades)? Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail has as long as its existed. Your knowledge is severely out-of-date.
Fixing the holes used by the virus to install itself? that should be possible without fixing bugs in Apple and Adobe products.
The holes used by the virus to install itself are *in* the Apple/Adobe/whoever products, though!
Microsoft already fixes their own problems. That's not the issue. The vast majority of virus infections don't come from Microsoft security holes, they come from Adobe security holes. It's not 2001 anymore.
Unless you honestly believe Microsoft should be fixing problems with other vendors' software, then you're not saying anything new: sure, Microsoft should fix their own holes, *but they already do that*. They can't legally do anything more than they're already doing.
I might try that --- though, admittedly, if Microsoft is so good at detecting the viruses, why don't they just prevent them better?
What do you suggest?
Require every.exe to be examined carefully by a Microsoft employee before executing? Sending a task squad to every Windows-using household to give them a 3-hour lecture on phishing and computer security? Fix security holes in other vendors' (Apple and Adobe primarily) products?
Praytell, what should they be doing *specifically*, that they aren't doing now?
I'm all for this, I think it would be wonderful and beautiful to just change a setting in my browser and never have to question whether I'm being surveiled or not.
You mean like the "block third-party cookies" option that's been in every browser for almost a decade? That setting?
Any good they do in research is negated in the sheer amount of frustration, inefficiency, and anger they produce from inflicting Lotus Notes on millions of unfortunate customers.
And, yet, she actually represents a lot of people who agree with her.
Ok. That's a pretty meaningless statement that applies to everybody popular.
You can't discount the sentiment that the US is more or less willing to hunt down and kill people who disagree with them.
Yes I can.
On the most fundamental level, I can discount the sentiment that there is such a thing as "the US." 307 million people, all of whom have different opinions, can't be lumped into a single group like that. In fact, I find it kind of insulting that you'd even try.
Slashdot Mirror
Usability testing before making a UI?
It's a hell of a lot easier then, then doing it after the bad UI is already in-place.
this whole thing started as a university project, if the devs had started with usability testing there would be no gimp for you to whine about.
For all practical purposes, there's no GIMP for me to whine about now. Since the UI is so rotten it's unusable, the product might as well not exist at all as far as I'm concerned.
your entire post is based on the premise that the gimp developers somehow owe you for using their software,
Of course not, it's based on the (possibly incorrect) assumption that the GIMP developers want to make good software that people find helpful. If their goal is to make bad software, well, cheers.
(BTW i fucking hate the ribbon (i've started learning keyboard shortcuts just so i know where stuff is, i guess you can call that more efficient) but i have no real issues with the gimp interface, maybe it's more subjective than you think?)
Like I just said, 'like' and 'dislike' aren't really factors in UI design.
If they had usability tested two alternatives, and both alternatives were equally usable, then, yes, selecting between the two would subjective. But that's not what they did.
my point was that if *you* were building an app and the interface worked the way you wanted it too then a bunch of people whined it didn't work how they wanted, would you be excited at this new opportunity to make it into an app with an interface you don't like or just tell them to fix it themselves?
I'd do the usability testing before I made any kind of UI at all, thus ensuring that the UI I did make had been studied intently, and was likely to please all users of my software.
But that's because I'm a software developer, and not a egotistic hack.
What the GIMP team should have done was swallowed their pride, then performed unbiased testing of their product. If the testing showed that their interface was superior, than good for them! But they didn't even attempt to test it, they just pig-headedly decreed that it was already superior.
Saying "fix it yourself" is retarded for several reasons:
1) The developers are entrusted with making a GUI that doesn't suck; that's part of their job that you can't shovel off to someone else.
2) End-users by-and-large don't know *how* to fix it themselves, and the rare few who do likely don't have the time to learn a large new codebase.
3) The developers themselves would have also benefited from a truly better UI, if they would swallow their pride long enough to create one.
(BTW 'like' and 'dislike' have very little place in UI design. Most people who dislike the Office 2007 interface are still measurably more efficient with it then when using Office 2003.)
We're not recharging. We're replacing, it's going to be in the bumper or something else standardized and a machine will switch it out in seconds.
No thanks! Worn-out and cheaply-made batteries explode... you're sure as hell not putting some other idiot's battery in my car at a service station. If your charging solution doesn't work with the battery I already own, it's no solution.
How would you feel if every time you bought gas, your tires got rotated out with the topmost set on a giant pile? Would you feel safe?
So when you encounter an article entitled, 'Is Twitter Censoring Wikileaks Trends?', what, pray-tell did you expect to find within it, exactly?
The usual Slashdot pattern is:
1) "Editor" posts ridiculously biased, or flat-out wrong, article
2) First few comments correct article
But when they post conspiracy theories, we get:
1) "Editor" posts ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theory pretending to be a legitimate article
2) First few comments trip over themselves not only justifying the conspiracy theory, but trying to expand it in new off-topic directions
So I guess, while you're generally correct, my only mistake is thinking that Slashdot comments would correct ridiculous conspiracy theories the same way they correct biased/wrong articles.
Therefore your position can be summed up, in it's complete context, as:
Because Twitter isn't attacking Wikileaks, anyone (on slashdot) who believes that Wikileaks is under attack is paranoid.
First of all, nobody (well, except you) is making the claim that Twitter is "attacking" Wikileaks-- where did that ridiculous little nugget of nonsense come from?
Secondly, my message is more along the lines of: "Because Twitter isn't censoring Wikileaks, people who believe Twitter is censoring Wikileaks are paranoid." That seems like pretty solid reasoning to me.
Whatever people think about *other* activities that may or may not be occurring against Wikileaks is off-topic, and therefore I'm not addressing those.
And yet here you are, in this comment, calling people names.
I didn't call anybody names. But I will now: BobMcD is a moron who can't read plain English.
If your position is the more reasonable one, why the passion in your response?
Because I'm sick of having to read paranoid rantings modded-up in every single goddamned story. The majority of the people here can't be paranoid nutbags, right? Then why are they getting modded-up? (OMG, I just made a paranoid conspiracy theory!!! They're out to get me!)
Besides, it isn't as if twitter would be the only thing Wikileaks has had to worry about over the last year or so. Or, what, if trends start to appear then Assange would be free to travel to the US again?
What? I have no idea what point you're trying to make...
Please just note how by dismissing a single element of what some perceive to be an alarming trend you have DISMISSED THE ENTIRE SITUATION as paranoia.
By "single element" do you mean Wikileaks not showing up on Twitter's Trending Topics list? The thing this topic is about? Am I reading this right? You're actually chiding me for being on-topic?
Please read the article. The statistics indicate there are way more people tweeting about wikileaks than are tweeting about the currently trending topics. It's about 3 times more popular than the top trends.
And yet I have no idea how the "trending topics" are determined, nor does the article writer seem to know. Considering the change they made to it a little while ago, I wouldn't be surprised if "total amount of traffic" isn't a big factor at all, since the entire point of the change was to de-list topics that *always* had a high amount of traffic.
God people on Slashdot are paranoid.
Or maybe... just maybe... not enough people are tweeting about it? Did that extremely simple, common-sense, explanation ever occur to you?
I hate to break this to you, but I can't remember jack I learned during my "second last year" (???) in high school. Hell, most of college is a blur, too. (Yes, I know, you post on Slashdot so you must have an amazing ROBOT MIND, but maybe your amazing ROBOT MIND can conceive of the notion that maybe, just maybe, some people forget some stuff they learned decades ago.)
When do students learn what the English construct "second last year" means in this context? Because I certainly haven't been exposed to that yet.
Twitter, like Google, has been close to Obama.
Are you... joking? I honestly can't tell.
You're just rephrasing exactly what I said. So... thanks for the contribution?
If the developers would have actually done *gasp* usability testing, there's no doubt they would have found that the vast majority of people considered the product confusing to the point of broken. They just couldn't be arsed to do actual testing, but they "obviously" were so right about it. You don't need "interface customization" code if your UI doesn't suck shit, so the fact that people brought that up is another clue they should have taken.
The most disgusting part of all of this is that you went through the effort of creating a new game, including (according to your post) re-creating all the graphics and sounds, and yet you didn't inject a single original idea . Even if you're not in the wrong legally (although I believe you are), you're a completely hack.
If I were you, I'd be ashamed of myself. All you've done is demonstrated to the world how bankrupt your creative vision is.
You're cheering this kind of behavior?
Yes, and here's why:
1) Many people here are defending him (spite is one of my most powerful motivators)
2) I like video games, and I like playing video games, and I want to play new video games. Every ripoff this guy makes is an original game that never happened, because he was too scared to try something new. Fuck that noise.
In fact, some fan based derived games have been accepted by the publishers (ie Capcom and MegaMan2D).
That's a choice they make. Namco has not made that choice.
So, in effect, Namco can claim that smashing small profitless indie endeavors such as "Super Pac" is how they keep a bigger company from making a Pacman game.
Or they could simply be "smashing" a small, profitless indie endeavor that blatantly ripped-off their game. Occam's Razor.
What Namco doesn't see (and what Capcom does) is that the people making and even playing these copies are fans of Pacman.
Ok? Yet so irrelevant.
I know this much is true, "Super Pac" played better than the official Namco Pacman Android app. So, continue to "cheer Namco on".
The game that crashed after level 3? You're a lair.
Even though millions of people need a little photo editing they aren't funding GIMP and the professionals rather end up paying for Photoshop, same goes for OpenOffice vs MS Office.
Yah, but GIMP alienated a *lot* of potential fans when they bull-headedly refused to even consider fixing their horribly-broken UI years ago. I'd consider them a special-case.
OpenOffice, though, just has the issue that it's bloated, slow, and not-very-compatible. The optimist in me says that with a few more years of development, it could massacre MS Office sales. The realist in me says "well they've been in this position for years now, and it's still bloated, slow, and not-very-compatible." So...
Some people think copyright infringement only covers directly ripping assets from games, not remaking it to look practically the same.
Those people are known as 'dupes'.
(With apologies to MST3K.)
I think what you call "anti copyright bias" is just plain common sense in most cases. Nintendo or whoever they are have made a shedload of cash from a single creative event that happened about 30 years ago. They then "rewrote" this idea numerous times and re-sold it because the copyright system allowed them to, and will allow them to pretty much for ever.
How about limiting the TIME of copyright to about 10 years so that people can rip mix and burn stuff to their heart's content, just like they used to a few hundred years ago?
People are already doing that, though. Super Meat Boy and Braid are two recent examples of games that benefit *a lot* from Nintendo's inventions, but they are allowed to exist just fine. Why? Well, because while they benefit from Nintendo's work, they don't flat-out copy it... this guy? He flat-out copied Pac-Man.
Look at the screenshot on his site. If you "draw it yourself to look like the original", and it turns out *pixel for pixel* to be identical to the original, how does that differ from copying? We're not dealing with a Van Gogh painting here; we're dealing with a computer graphic composed of limited amounts of pixels.
Well, seriously. The art is so identical that there's *no way to tell* whether it was simply copied (copyright), or re-created but looks suspiciously similar (trademark). Seriously, click through to his site and look at the screenshots... if his version of Pac-Man had a round mouth instead of a triangle, or was colored purple and had an eye on a stalk or something, well, ok. But in this case, I'm kind of cheering Namco on.
Most people still use the email client that came with their machine, which equates to some form of Windows / outlook stuff, which shows images by default.
Outlook, and Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail block images by default. Outlook has for years (decades)? Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail has as long as its existed. Your knowledge is severely out-of-date.
Fixing the holes used by the virus to install itself? that should be possible without fixing bugs in Apple and Adobe products.
The holes used by the virus to install itself are *in* the Apple/Adobe/whoever products, though!
Microsoft already fixes their own problems. That's not the issue. The vast majority of virus infections don't come from Microsoft security holes, they come from Adobe security holes. It's not 2001 anymore.
Unless you honestly believe Microsoft should be fixing problems with other vendors' software, then you're not saying anything new: sure, Microsoft should fix their own holes, *but they already do that*. They can't legally do anything more than they're already doing.
I might try that --- though, admittedly, if Microsoft is so good at detecting the viruses, why don't they just prevent them better?
What do you suggest?
Require every .exe to be examined carefully by a Microsoft employee before executing? Sending a task squad to every Windows-using household to give them a 3-hour lecture on phishing and computer security? Fix security holes in other vendors' (Apple and Adobe primarily) products?
Praytell, what should they be doing *specifically*, that they aren't doing now?
I'm all for this, I think it would be wonderful and beautiful to just change a setting in my browser and never have to question whether I'm being surveiled or not.
You mean like the "block third-party cookies" option that's been in every browser for almost a decade? That setting?
That would imply they test changes before pushing them into production. Sounds pretty unlikely to me.
Any good they do in research is negated in the sheer amount of frustration, inefficiency, and anger they produce from inflicting Lotus Notes on millions of unfortunate customers.
And, yet, she actually represents a lot of people who agree with her.
Ok. That's a pretty meaningless statement that applies to everybody popular.
You can't discount the sentiment that the US is more or less willing to hunt down and kill people who disagree with them.
Yes I can.
On the most fundamental level, I can discount the sentiment that there is such a thing as "the US." 307 million people, all of whom have different opinions, can't be lumped into a single group like that. In fact, I find it kind of insulting that you'd even try.
It feels as if America has lost its glory, pursuing its reputation like a bully.
Sarah Palin != America