This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz
by James Robertson.
Original Post: Church of the Obvious
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rssBlogView.xml
Feed Description: James Robertson comments on Cincom Smalltalk, the Smalltalk development community, and IT trends and issues in general.
Don Park comments on why Open Source projects typically have low quality UI's:
open source developers have little interest nor incentive to do it right.
most software developers lack the knowledge and experience to design good UIs.
UI design is hard and insanely tedious, even for the professionals.
This was in response to Eric Raymond's post lamenting this. I'd add a simple observation - open source developers tend to build exactly what they need - and nothing else. Why? Well, this hearkens somewhat back to this topic. Most open source projects are small efforts (there are exceptions, like Eclipse and Apache). Most of these efforts are also not really about making money. As Don mentions, building a decent UI takes time and effort. If you aren't being paid, there's very, very little incentive to put in the kind of effort MS and Apple clearly do. Instead, you'll build something that's clear to you (the developer) and move on to more "interesting" (read - technically challenging) problems.
Heck, you see this in commercial projects as well. For years, VisualWorks had a second rate user presentation, because the tools were being built by engineers as an afterthought. We have people who are interested in and care about presentation on staff now, and it shows (compare the UI from 5i.3 forward to the UI for 5i.2 and previous to see what I mean). Small open source efforts are going to fall into this as well, unless they are fortunate enough to have a developer who actually cares about these issues. The larger ones - Eclipse, Apache, et. al. - are effectively commercial (i.e., funded) efforts and can afford to pay someone to care.
A lot of things fall into the "UI bucket" that aren't strictly speaking UI - anything that qualifies as a "finishing touches" issue will tend to fall by the wayside in open source projects. This isn't a flaw in open source development; it's simply human nature at work - and I expect that it's one of the reasons that political decisions to move to Linux (like this one) are going to run into rough patches. There are rough edges in Linux that many end users are going to be very frustrated with.
Previous Topic
