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
