25 Jul
2005
25 Jul
'05
7:16 p.m.
On 25 July 2005 at 15:46, Ben Loftis <ben(a)glw.com> wrote:
Most professional audio gear is like a bicycle. A
bike is
certainly not intuitive to a first time user, but once you
learn how to balance, steer, etc, you can get around faster
than someone on foot. This has sometimes been described as
"intuitable" rather than intuitive.
Or, "discoverable" versus "usable".
Word is easy to discover for easy things to do. 'vi' is
*much* faster, if my 'vi' speed versus the 'Word' speed of my
compatriots is any gauge. Pull-down menus are "intuitive", where
as hot-keys are not. But, hot-keys get the work done quickly
once they're known. Pull-down menus which list their hot-key
shortcuts in the menu are quite nice for me. The Opera web
browser is one example of this.
Professional audio tools can look quite alarming to
the novice
but must allow a pro facing a tight deadline to get his or
her work done. Ardour should strive to be intuitable, not
intuitive. I think it is progressing in this direction quite
nicely.
Yes, Ardour was a little usable to me right away. After a few
hours, and the tutorial, it became quite useful for 80% of what I
want to do with it. There are still things that I need to learn.
On the other hand, I've used 3 different stand-alone DAWs, two
from Roland and one from BOSS. Each of those was *much* more
difficult to use or learn than Ardour, and I needed to memorize
or write down the obscure button-press combinations & sequences
to be able to do even simple things. That said, they are nice
units when driven right by someone expert at doing so.
Cheers...
--
Kevin