[Glastonbury] "An Open Source Horror Story" article....

[tim hall]

On Saturday 28 February 2004 5:54 am, Sean Miller wrote:
> See http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html
>
> Thoughts?

I do kind of agree with the general tone of this article, badly designed GUIs 
are disempowering and tend to make newbies feel extra stupid. The CUPS 
interface is by no means the worst, I've pretty much stopped using phpmyadmin 
and learned to use the CLI instead, i find it much less frustrating and I get 
a feeling that I'm directly manipulating the data, rather than doing it with 
rubber gloves through an opaque plexiglass screen.

Yesterday I was looking for an application to help edit .ogg comment tags, in 
the end I realised that vorbiscomment and a text editor were my best friends 
here after looking at several badly designed GUIs - you click the buttons, 
change the info and then check the comment tags to find that nothing 
happenned! Very frustrating, especially for such a simple job.

Similarly the GUI for ecasound tkeca is revolting, it looks horrible, involves 
lots of buttons with single letters on them, no tooltips or explanation and 
it bombs everytime I try to do something with it (and it's built with tk 
ugh). The original CLI for ecasound, by contrast is an absolute joy to use, 
the documentation is clear and down to earth and doesn't attempt to blind 
with science or confuse with clever sounding technical terms. Kai Vehmanen is 
a genius, the interface makes me feel happy and clever (no mean feat :-) and 
I was making music within minutes. 

It does seem that most developers & packagers find it hard to think themselves 
into the state of a clueless newbie. I've come across lots of applications 
that don't launch from the menu because they've left off the appropriate 
switches from the command. duh!

There are some GUIs I use and like - synaptic being one for general package 
browsing and upgrades, it's very well designed IMO and there are plenty of 
other examples, so it's not all that bleak.

Rants are cheap and easy to write, at the end of the day Linux relies on 
programmers writing actual working code, those of us that can't do that can 
help by testing it out and making bug reports / feature requests. I'm always 
grateful to anyone who writes even half-way decent code and is prepared to 
freely release it.

cheers

tim hall