8 Jun
2004
8 Jun
'04
2:40 p.m.
On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 05:50:42 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
But I intended to point out two other things:
* First is, that usability has nothing to do with nice looks. I
truely believe - and given some research time, I'm sure I could prove
it as well - that photorealistic graphical user interfaces modelled
after hardware when shown on a screen are far from usability. Other
people will probably want just that: photo-GUIs. I fear, looking at
the commercial audio market, that exactly these might happen in the
Linux Sound world: eye candy, but bad usability.
Theres two seperate points there:
"...that usability has nothing to do with nice looks"
Hmm, maybe, depends how you define 'nice'. nice != photorealsitic in my
book. I think ableton live is 'nice', and it has a very useable UI - an
equivlanet built with stock GTK/Qt slider widgets would be nowhere near as
usable, IMHO.
and "...I truely believe - and given some research time, I'm sure I could
prove it as well - that photorealistic graphical user interfaces modelled
after hardware when shown on a screen are far from usability..."
That I agree with, with a very small number of exceptions.
LADSPA combined with Jack is of course a good example
of this
philosophy. Look e.g. at Jackrack: it does provide a consistent GUI
for LADSPA plugins, that you could use just fine with every other
jack-enabled application, and one will get a very usable and
consistent interface. And that even without Steve wasting his precious
time writing GUI code. ;)
Thats true (and I have no intention of wasting my time writing GUI code
:). But, there are plugins that could be better with *appropriate* UIs, it
doesnt take much, but I think it can make a huge difference - e.g.
superlooper. There are also plugins that aren't being written, becuase
they would just be unusable.
- Steve