John Gruber Explains Why Free Software Has Poor Usability
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
It's true that at the very high end, the "polish" of commercial software is better. There's no free equivalent to, say, Apple's release and UI artwork processes. But that's not strictly a "usability" critique. There's plenty of beautiful-but-clunky software out there.
Don't you know? Apple is awesome, and those who criticize them "just don't get it".
I am writing this on a Apple MBP, so it's not like I have total disdain for Apple products, but Apple fanboys can be infuriating…
Its much more convincing to criticize his argument than just him. He makes a strong point - Software interfaces only are as good as the head guy in charge cares about. So if the head guy doesn't care much about the interface, the interface will suck even if there are great designers working on the project.
I'd say that open source software often has medium to poor interface quality is that making software look good takes a lot of time and has to be done by someone with design talent. This isn't usually the case - usually the lead programmer decided how it would look from the beginning, or just copied some other software.
If anything, open source software is usually decent because they most often just copy some commercial piece of software - which is usually decent. In the few cases where they get creative with the interface (like the gimp) it can come out half-baked because they don't spend enough time evaluating the usability of the design. (not that the gimp interface is half-baked).
It's not like it would be hard. Configuring Xorg makes me cry, and CUPS was still no walk in the park last time I checked.
It often boils down to the difficult task of discerning usability, intuitiveness, efficiency, and familiarity.
For people accustomed to basic painting applications that provide all manner of circles, lines, and squares, it comes as a surprise that such tools are so buried in Photoshop or GIMP. But it turns out that drawing lines is simply not that important for most Photoshop users, since lines aren't that important for photo touchup, creating web graphics, or digital painting. For line-heavy art, there are better tools like Illustrator.
The problem is that GIMP is tasked with replacing both Photoshop and MS Paint on the Linux desktop. The hidden assumption is that since Photoshop is more "powerful", its feature set is adequate for typical MS Paint tasks... which is akin to assuming that Linux doesn't need a word processor because TeX is more powerful.