11 ms·

It's a bit sad, that even open source projects that are this big, don't have any cohesion of UI. The whole things looks like as if every developer that worked

It's a bit sad, that even open source projects that are this big, don't have any cohesion of UI. The whole things looks like as if every developer that worked on it just decided to randomly place a button for their feature somewhere. Well... probably that's what happened. Unfortunately, until most OSS looks like this, it'll be very hard for them to gain ground over the commercial alternatives.

brundozer 6y ago
Exactly. It would be amazing to have some of the many incredible UX/UI designers out there help with open source projects like these. So many potential adopters are lost just because of the interface, no matter how awesome the software is.
- tclancy 6y ago
  I feel like that’s the next step for open source, but it will take committed UX people who are also politic enough to sell developers doing things in their free time to use some more of that time to do things right.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    "People working on open source are hobbyists doing it their free time" is such a tired idea. Here is a thought: do you want committed UX people working on open source? PAY THEM! If every developer set aside a budget of 5-10% they spend on proprietary services to contribute to the funding of open source projects, there would be enough to attract hordes of UX professionals. It amazes me how much of a premium people for, e.g, Apple products yet can not plan to spare 5-10 bucks a month to support R&D of open source.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    > UX people who are also politic enough to sell developers This, 100%. UX doesn't respect development because devs tend not to care about UX. Development doesn't respect UX because UXers tend not to care about development. IMHO, devs tend to assume everyone is a programmer. And many people are very much not. Which is why even graphical OSS tends to look and work like... git.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
elric 6y ago
You're not wrong, but feel free to scratch that itch, I'm sure they'd welcome a patch. Companies spend a lot of money on tools like Zoom. If instead they donated a couple of man-days to projects like OpenMeetings or Jitsi, these tools would be in much better shape and we'd all have free conferencing software.
- randomchars 6y ago
  I wish I could! I'm not preaching anything here, my own personal projects look nothing better than this, as I'm a developer, not a designer. And even if I was a UI/UX person, I think this is a deeper problem than a patch could solve.
- weisk 6y ago
  Hello, do you know how or who should I approach in order to offer my studio's professional services (for free of course) for tackling this UI problem? I want to commit to this, but with some kind of planning, just blindly sending PR's seems like its not gonna be throwing hours go the void.
- remir 6y ago
  I think most companies, especially now, want a turn-key solution with support in case of an issue. The fact that Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting, WebEx and Google Meet are closed sourced is a non issue for most organizations. They want something that works right now.
ognarb 6y ago
There are three better open source alternative to this: Nextcloud, Matrix/Element and BigBlueButton. All three have a way better interface than this. Nextcloud is more oriented towards storing files but recently gained tons of social features (video chat, messaging) and has since some time already document editing with LibreOffice online and a build in document editor. There are also tons of other features like LDAP integration, calendars, ... Matrix/Element is oriented towards messaging between organizations and inside organizations. Element also support video chat and contains an Etherpad integration for document editing. BigBlueButton is not great for messaging but is excellent for video chatting. It scale a lot better for big rooms than Nextcloud and Matrix because it doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing. So yeah OpenMeetings is not really a flagship open source software and I'm wondering how it ended up in the front page of HN.
- randomchars 6y ago
  I'm not familiar with BigBlueButton, but Nextcloud and Element both have a real (for profit?) company backing them, and they have full time employees working there. They're even hiring, with 7 and 8 job openings ATM.
  - edwinbalani 6y ago
    BigBlueButton is largely led by Blindside Networks -- they also oversee the holding of the BigBlueButton trademark, logomark, etc. Blindside's commercial element is to to consult on educational deployment of the software (which is its intended use).
- edwinbalani 6y ago
  > BigBlueButton [...] doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing. With a few others, I struggled through setting up a "distributed" (i.e. not all on a single machine) BBB deployment early in the pandemic, back when the documentation and community explosion hadn't quite happened. Such a deployment is nonstandard and you're left to your own devices to make it work, albeit with some decent architectural documentation so that you can work out which component needs to run where. BBB does rely on WebRTC exclusively for its media. The so-called 'HTML5' client is in-browser. There is a Flash-based client that's officially deprecated, and they're slowly stripping out support for it. There is also some optional Etherpad integration, so that you can collaborate on in-meeting notes that are made available afterwards. BBB's biggest problem right now is that the Debian packaging, which is the only official way of deploying the software, is not open source. It's also really messy -- some stuff goes into /usr/local, some into /opt, with a fair deal of leftover crud that isn't used any more like the Flash client. This is an unintentional situation, but the maintainers have deprioritised making the software truly "open source" (IMO) in favour of bugfixes and features. I don't think this situation meets the GPL it's licensed under, regardless of whether you would qualify this as "open source" or not.
c22 6y ago
I feel like this is a problem I've noticed with Apache projects in particular. I've used plenty of open source software with reasonably cohesive UI.
brospars 6y ago
There are plenty of great OSS that looks great but they are often backed or owned by a real company and not just a community project. Gitlab, Firefox, VLC, Blender, VScode or BBB, Jitsi Meet for videoconference...
- blackoil 6y ago
  Most of the projects you listed, aren't developed in the `Bazaar` environment. They have a complete team with managers, designers and developers working full time in cohesion. They are cathedrals, who open sourced the product.
Descensus 6y ago
That was the first thing I thought. UI is super important, and I hate when I see great projects suffer because they're.. well, ugly.
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
It's time to separate UI from logic (finally). Let the UI guys make UI projects that hook onto engines made by backend guys. Why one frontend? Let the community come up with a few and don't let a backend engineer and their practices and ideas anywhere close to a designer, the former will suffocate the latter with their total lack of vision and sensitivity.
bdcravens 6y ago
My first impression was that the software was from (as in, last updated) around 2008, possibly earlier. It has a very Windows XP era vibe.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Exactly. Not even 2008, maybe dotcom era.
  - deepspace 6y ago
    Definitely. It even vaguely reminds me of some GUIs written on top of MSDOS, before Windows became popular.
dmje 6y ago
Man, just what I popped in here to say too. Looks like something from the late 80s.
caymanjim 6y ago
Is there a single Java application with a good UI? Apache is fixated on Java, and Java seems to only attract a certain kind of developer. Even Java web applications, which aren't constrained by available UI toolkits, tend to look like they were written in Java (for example, all the AWS UIs). I think the language fails to attract design/UI/UX people.
- ghosty141 6y ago
  In my opinion Java makes it really hard to create beautiful UIs without spending much time on it. I also agree that Java attracts a certain kind of developer.
- LockAndLol 6y ago
  I always found jdownloader to be quite beautiful. Way before youtube-dl was a thing, jdownloader was there to the rescue.
  - dschuessler 6y ago
    No need to talk about jdownloader in past tense. It is still actively developed and I prefer it over youtube-dl most of the time, because it is way faster due to use of multiple connections.
- piercebot 6y ago
  The good news is that there's development in this space! https://github.com/jetbrains/skija https://github.com/jetbrains/skija > Existing offerings are: Graphics2D from AWT, GraphicsContext from JavaFX. They are good, but underwhelming. > Enter Skia. Skia has a proven track record of industrial-scale project relying on it for all things graphics: Google Chrome, Android, Flutter, Firefox Canvas, Xamarin, LibreOffice.
- thebean11 6y ago
  JetBrains IDEs, although I'm sure some would disagree with me there
hunter2_ 6y ago
I wonder if the disconnect is that the phrase "open source" refers to "source code," and UI designers who would otherwise feel able to contribute may think "I don't produce source code, I produce [whatever artifact of their process]; too bad the pull request workflow only collects source code and a readme." If I'm correct to suspect that this train of thought might exist (and not only keeping UI designers away, but all sorts of related professions like product managers, marketing, etc.) then maybe the whole notion of "[product] is open source, contribute to the source code or issue queue" needs to be rebranded as "[product] is an open collective work, contribute in any possible way" with a collaborationware workflow that doesn't consider changing the source and filing issues (bugs, feature requests) to be the only first class citizens. Many projects do have communities with robust organization of leadership, management, branding, etc. but with real or perceived barriers to entry that don't give the same sense of openness and "everyone can contribute to this well-oiled contribution intake machine" in non-code aspects akin to what developers enjoy.
- pmontra 6y ago
  My guess is that developers that want to do something start coding and hammer out any UI that barely works. On the other side UI designers that want to do something don't start coding because they usually can't code. Their free work doesn't make it into open source. Do they even do free work? No idea. Any UI designer here?
maxwell 6y ago
I was thinking the same thing, then I saw the next story on the home page: https://opensourcedesign.net https://opensourcedesign.net
- pabs3 6y ago
  I posted that because of a comment down-thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208793
mola 6y ago
To be fair, zoom feels the same. Utterly incoherent and ugly UI without any thought for UX. But it gained a lot of traction. So maybe it's not that important.
novok 6y ago
I thought this comment was a bit overblown until I clicked the link. And then I audibly snorted at how bad the UI was.

brundozer 6y ago

Exactly. It would be amazing to have some of the many incredible UX/UI designers out there help with open source projects like these. So many potential adopters are lost just because of the interface, no matter how awesome the software is.

tclancy 6y ago
I feel like that’s the next step for open source, but it will take committed UX people who are also politic enough to sell developers doing things in their free time to use some more of that time to do things right.
- rglullis 6y ago
  "People working on open source are hobbyists doing it their free time" is such a tired idea. Here is a thought: do you want committed UX people working on open source? PAY THEM! If every developer set aside a budget of 5-10% they spend on proprietary services to contribute to the funding of open source projects, there would be enough to attract hordes of UX professionals. It amazes me how much of a premium people for, e.g, Apple products yet can not plan to spare 5-10 bucks a month to support R&D of open source.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  > UX people who are also politic enough to sell developers This, 100%. UX doesn't respect development because devs tend not to care about UX. Development doesn't respect UX because UXers tend not to care about development. IMHO, devs tend to assume everyone is a programmer. And many people are very much not. Which is why even graphical OSS tends to look and work like... git.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

elric 6y ago

You're not wrong, but feel free to scratch that itch, I'm sure they'd welcome a patch. Companies spend a lot of money on tools like Zoom. If instead they donated a couple of man-days to projects like OpenMeetings or Jitsi, these tools would be in much better shape and we'd all have free conferencing software.

randomchars 6y ago
I wish I could! I'm not preaching anything here, my own personal projects look nothing better than this, as I'm a developer, not a designer. And even if I was a UI/UX person, I think this is a deeper problem than a patch could solve.
weisk 6y ago
Hello, do you know how or who should I approach in order to offer my studio's professional services (for free of course) for tackling this UI problem? I want to commit to this, but with some kind of planning, just blindly sending PR's seems like its not gonna be throwing hours go the void.
remir 6y ago
I think most companies, especially now, want a turn-key solution with support in case of an issue. The fact that Zoom, Teams, GoToMeeting, WebEx and Google Meet are closed sourced is a non issue for most organizations. They want something that works right now.

ognarb 6y ago

There are three better open source alternative to this: Nextcloud, Matrix/Element and BigBlueButton. All three have a way better interface than this. Nextcloud is more oriented towards storing files but recently gained tons of social features (video chat, messaging) and has since some time already document editing with LibreOffice online and a build in document editor. There are also tons of other features like LDAP integration, calendars, ... Matrix/Element is oriented towards messaging between organizations and inside organizations. Element also support video chat and contains an Etherpad integration for document editing. BigBlueButton is not great for messaging but is excellent for video chatting. It scale a lot better for big rooms than Nextcloud and Matrix because it doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing. So yeah OpenMeetings is not really a flagship open source software and I'm wondering how it ended up in the front page of HN.

randomchars 6y ago
I'm not familiar with BigBlueButton, but Nextcloud and Element both have a real (for profit?) company backing them, and they have full time employees working there. They're even hiring, with 7 and 8 job openings ATM.
- edwinbalani 6y ago
  BigBlueButton is largely led by Blindside Networks -- they also oversee the holding of the BigBlueButton trademark, logomark, etc. Blindside's commercial element is to to consult on educational deployment of the software (which is its intended use).
edwinbalani 6y ago
> BigBlueButton [...] doesn't use Jitst and WebRTC, but it doesn't include any document editing. With a few others, I struggled through setting up a "distributed" (i.e. not all on a single machine) BBB deployment early in the pandemic, back when the documentation and community explosion hadn't quite happened. Such a deployment is nonstandard and you're left to your own devices to make it work, albeit with some decent architectural documentation so that you can work out which component needs to run where. BBB does rely on WebRTC exclusively for its media. The so-called 'HTML5' client is in-browser. There is a Flash-based client that's officially deprecated, and they're slowly stripping out support for it. There is also some optional Etherpad integration, so that you can collaborate on in-meeting notes that are made available afterwards. BBB's biggest problem right now is that the Debian packaging, which is the only official way of deploying the software, is not open source. It's also really messy -- some stuff goes into /usr/local, some into /opt, with a fair deal of leftover crud that isn't used any more like the Flash client. This is an unintentional situation, but the maintainers have deprioritised making the software truly "open source" (IMO) in favour of bugfixes and features. I don't think this situation meets the GPL it's licensed under, regardless of whether you would qualify this as "open source" or not.

c22 6y ago

I feel like this is a problem I've noticed with Apache projects in particular. I've used plenty of open source software with reasonably cohesive UI.

brospars 6y ago

There are plenty of great OSS that looks great but they are often backed or owned by a real company and not just a community project. Gitlab, Firefox, VLC, Blender, VScode or BBB, Jitsi Meet for videoconference...

blackoil 6y ago
Most of the projects you listed, aren't developed in the `Bazaar` environment. They have a complete team with managers, designers and developers working full time in cohesion. They are cathedrals, who open sourced the product.

Descensus 6y ago

That was the first thing I thought. UI is super important, and I hate when I see great projects suffer because they're.. well, ugly.

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

It's time to separate UI from logic (finally). Let the UI guys make UI projects that hook onto engines made by backend guys. Why one frontend? Let the community come up with a few and don't let a backend engineer and their practices and ideas anywhere close to a designer, the former will suffocate the latter with their total lack of vision and sensitivity.

bdcravens 6y ago

My first impression was that the software was from (as in, last updated) around 2008, possibly earlier. It has a very Windows XP era vibe.

fakedang 6y ago
Exactly. Not even 2008, maybe dotcom era.
- deepspace 6y ago
  Definitely. It even vaguely reminds me of some GUIs written on top of MSDOS, before Windows became popular.

dmje 6y ago

Man, just what I popped in here to say too. Looks like something from the late 80s.

caymanjim 6y ago

Is there a single Java application with a good UI? Apache is fixated on Java, and Java seems to only attract a certain kind of developer. Even Java web applications, which aren't constrained by available UI toolkits, tend to look like they were written in Java (for example, all the AWS UIs). I think the language fails to attract design/UI/UX people.

ghosty141 6y ago
In my opinion Java makes it really hard to create beautiful UIs without spending much time on it. I also agree that Java attracts a certain kind of developer.
LockAndLol 6y ago
I always found jdownloader to be quite beautiful. Way before youtube-dl was a thing, jdownloader was there to the rescue.
- dschuessler 6y ago
  No need to talk about jdownloader in past tense. It is still actively developed and I prefer it over youtube-dl most of the time, because it is way faster due to use of multiple connections.
piercebot 6y ago
The good news is that there's development in this space! https://github.com/jetbrains/skija https://github.com/jetbrains/skija > Existing offerings are: Graphics2D from AWT, GraphicsContext from JavaFX. They are good, but underwhelming. > Enter Skia. Skia has a proven track record of industrial-scale project relying on it for all things graphics: Google Chrome, Android, Flutter, Firefox Canvas, Xamarin, LibreOffice.
thebean11 6y ago
JetBrains IDEs, although I'm sure some would disagree with me there

hunter2_ 6y ago

I wonder if the disconnect is that the phrase "open source" refers to "source code," and UI designers who would otherwise feel able to contribute may think "I don't produce source code, I produce [whatever artifact of their process]; too bad the pull request workflow only collects source code and a readme." If I'm correct to suspect that this train of thought might exist (and not only keeping UI designers away, but all sorts of related professions like product managers, marketing, etc.) then maybe the whole notion of "[product] is open source, contribute to the source code or issue queue" needs to be rebranded as "[product] is an open collective work, contribute in any possible way" with a collaborationware workflow that doesn't consider changing the source and filing issues (bugs, feature requests) to be the only first class citizens. Many projects do have communities with robust organization of leadership, management, branding, etc. but with real or perceived barriers to entry that don't give the same sense of openness and "everyone can contribute to this well-oiled contribution intake machine" in non-code aspects akin to what developers enjoy.

pmontra 6y ago
My guess is that developers that want to do something start coding and hammer out any UI that barely works. On the other side UI designers that want to do something don't start coding because they usually can't code. Their free work doesn't make it into open source. Do they even do free work? No idea. Any UI designer here?

maxwell 6y ago

I was thinking the same thing, then I saw the next story on the home page: https://opensourcedesign.net https://opensourcedesign.net

pabs3 6y ago
I posted that because of a comment down-thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208793

mola 6y ago

To be fair, zoom feels the same. Utterly incoherent and ugly UI without any thought for UX. But it gained a lot of traction. So maybe it's not that important.

novok 6y ago

I thought this comment was a bit overblown until I clicked the link. And then I audibly snorted at how bad the UI was.