[LAU] An appeal to famous artists?

[Simon Wise]

On 11/08/11 03:28, Emanuel Rumpf wrote:
> 2011/8/8 Fons Adriaensen<fons at linuxaudio.org>:
>>
>>
>> (vi) It's a tool for people who know what they are doing, and you
>> have to read the manual or at least some introduction to
>> understand how it works. Why didn't you do that ? :-)
>>
>
> Would you like to hear that I had been unmotivated ?  ;)
>
> One of the first things I do to discover an application is to run it.
> (Sometimes I read a short description and see the screenshot.)
>
> This gives me an impression
> - does it work at all, is it stable
> - how does the program present itself
> - how does it look, how are things arranged
> - how does it treat me as user (introduction, interactivity, help, ..)
> - am I able to make out how things work
> - do I recognize any logical structure
> - are things obvious or do I have to spend weeks to get into it
>
> Is the application worth to spend the time to read the manual ?
>
> Are you actually suggesting me to read the manuals of all the programs
> I've been trying (hundreds) , before having even used them ?  :)

or lurking on lists like this, and hearing from those who have tried them, or 
asking colleagues who have the same needs or ...

>
> An application that doesn't attend to the GUI may create
> the impression that internals might be equally messed up.

or that it is written to be used in an unusual way - maybe because its purpose 
is not similar to a word processor or a spreadsheet so its interface may not be 
familiar - take Blender, or watch a film editor using Final Cut Pro. In the case 
of FCP there is also a click-around interface (Apple has a big budget and can 
afford the development time to do both) but it is very much less efficient, and 
teaching FCP to aspiring editors means teaching them the proper interface, not 
the pretty face.

>
> An application that doesn't attend to the user may create
> the impression to be written for a hurried or selfish dev. him/herself.

but I have opened quite a few apps with nice user GUI interfaces and extremely 
limited, and often buggy implementations - which you only discover once you 
start to try to do something real, using the manual, rather than click around 
exploring. Of course that is after you have paid for it, if it was a commercial 
app. If you were going to buy it you would probably have looked at comments and 
reviews first, and found out then if you were interested or not.

>
> Another example: some years ago, I've been starting Anjuta IDE and Kdevelop :
> Anjuta crashed after the splash screen
> in Kdevel the menu and config was clean enough to quickly set things up.
> Would you guess which one I did continue to use ?
> I've been able to decide and use there, without ever reading the manual :)

yes, one crashed immediately - not a good sign. Either the app was not good, or 
it was not properly installed on your system, did you ever find out which?


Simon