4 ms·

Splashup reviewd by a User Interface blog. - It's pretty rough

9 points by Readmore 19y ago

Not trying to pick on anyone. It's just good to hear honest feedback, especially about an interface.

tptacek 19y ago
Are these reviews by the same team that tried to clone Quicksilver for Windows and wound up with nothing more than Launchy set in Garamond?
- webwright 19y ago
  Ow. That's harsh. They also did http://www.songza.com/ http://www.songza.com/ , which I think is pretty elegant. Here's the response to the Quicksilver Clone accusations: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-windows/ http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-... At the end of the day, these guys are pretty sharp about UI, IMO-- whether they cloned something or not.
  - jey 19y ago
    Enso seemed to just show a lot of idiosyncratic ideas about how UI design "should" be. The idea that the user should type some extra command, or hold down some extra key -- that's all crap. I'm a loyal Quicksilver user who bought into their arguments and tried using Enso at work on WinXP for a few weeks, and Quicksilver beats Enso hands down. Quicksilver just works and is friendly, whereas Enso tries to convert you to their quirky UI cult. I like the idea behind Enso's "commands", but why the hell make it mandatory? Make the default action what the user expects by default, and allow the user to override it in exceptional cases -- a la Quicksilver!
    - tptacek 19y ago
      I was being deliberately rude and snarky about Humanized, who, let it be said, can choose contrasting color saturations with the greatest of ease, and can "collect user interface evidence" circles around my command-line ass. But I agree, I think their attempt to position Enso versus Quicksilver is weak. If Quicksilver was ported to Windows, nobody would use Enso; the marginal cost of that particular value prop for Windows users is already zero, and Quicksilver's "search-and-act" idiom is just more sophisticated, and makes a greater contribution to UI design, than does Enso's. Sorry, command completion? Not revolutionary.
- jacobolus 19y ago
  First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills. Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that, experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new application, with its own ideas. Third, what the hell is Launchy?
  - pius 19y ago
    When people say, "I wish Windows had something like Quicksilver," Launchy is usually what gets brought up in response. http://www.launchy.net/ http://www.launchy.net/
  - tptacek 19y ago
    It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X. In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.
    - mwerty 19y ago
      Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.
      - tptacek 19y ago
        Ok, let's all have a debate about neurosurgery!
        mwerty 19y ago
        If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?
downer 19y ago
I wonder if a retargeted GTK library would allow you to run The Gimp as an AJAX application; either that or perhaps a Flash FreeNX client. Ulteo made OpenOffice work online: http://lifehacker.com/software/online-documents/use-openoffice-online-with-ulteo-332841.php http://lifehacker.com/software/online-documents/use-openoffi...
- tx 19y ago
  Gimp as AJAX application? Jesus... not only this sentence makes no sense ("AJAX" is just one stupid function call), but the idea of running everything "online" is just silly. WHY would I want to screw myself in the butt by using "online apps" for editing my digital camera photos? Why would I want to wait hours for 2GB of photos to get uploaded at 35kb/sec and then limit myself to a pathetic subset of perfectly functioning desktop application? Because there are many techies out there who are greedy and fail to innovate, preferring to re-implement tiny fractions of existing software instead. And burning someone else's millions in the process. I will not be surprised if we'll see hard drive formatting utilities, backed by VC millions, running inside of the browser, so you can "Format your Drive from Anywhere!!!" A lot of Valley people need to stop drinking kool-aid and read uncov.com more often.
  - SwellJoe 19y ago
    Yeah, because nobody wants to upload and store their photos on the web--so they certainly don't want to be able to edit them once stored there. You're just missing the point by a mile. Online photo editing is a great feature for people who have already committed their entire photo collection to flickr (or one of the other several dozen competitors). There will come a time when photos are mostly taken by cell phone cameras, uploaded on the spot, and never dealt with except in an online form. An online editor is the only sane solution. But, I agree that porting GIMP to forward its UI out to a browser is madness. Writing a GTK to JavaScript layer is probably significantly harder than writing an image editor from scratch in pure JavaScript or Flash (at least the 20% solution that'll satisfy 80% of users).
    - tx 19y ago
derefr 19y ago
This sounds like a review of Fireworks: "...The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must manually dississed [sic]; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below the menu-bar and doesn't interrupt your work. The first method is horrible, the second is decent." "For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to work when you click on them, but they don't have any effect unless you already have text selected." "Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text objects." (Excepting the fact that empty (sub-)layers in Fireworks are destroyed when you exit them.) "...there are "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons at the top of the screen, and nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons" and "you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked region in the extreme corner."
herdrick 19y ago
When you want a really powerful tool, you usually have to accept a tougher learning curve. Yes, most web apps should be immediately understandable, their features laid plain to the first-time user. The problem is, advanced image editing involves a ton of UI moving parts. I think most of what those guys complain about are things where Splashup carefully follows the Photoshop UI. I think these web UI guys aren't approaching Splashup in the right way.

9 points by Readmore 19y ago

Not trying to pick on anyone. It's just good to hear honest feedback, especially about an interface.

Are these reviews by the same team that tried to clone Quicksilver for Windows and wound up with nothing more than Launchy set in Garamond?

webwright 19y ago
Ow. That's harsh. They also did http://www.songza.com/ http://www.songza.com/ , which I think is pretty elegant. Here's the response to the Quicksilver Clone accusations: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-windows/ http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-... At the end of the day, these guys are pretty sharp about UI, IMO-- whether they cloned something or not.
- jey 19y ago
  Enso seemed to just show a lot of idiosyncratic ideas about how UI design "should" be. The idea that the user should type some extra command, or hold down some extra key -- that's all crap. I'm a loyal Quicksilver user who bought into their arguments and tried using Enso at work on WinXP for a few weeks, and Quicksilver beats Enso hands down. Quicksilver just works and is friendly, whereas Enso tries to convert you to their quirky UI cult. I like the idea behind Enso's "commands", but why the hell make it mandatory? Make the default action what the user expects by default, and allow the user to override it in exceptional cases -- a la Quicksilver!
  - tptacek 19y ago
    I was being deliberately rude and snarky about Humanized, who, let it be said, can choose contrasting color saturations with the greatest of ease, and can "collect user interface evidence" circles around my command-line ass. But I agree, I think their attempt to position Enso versus Quicksilver is weak. If Quicksilver was ported to Windows, nobody would use Enso; the marginal cost of that particular value prop for Windows users is already zero, and Quicksilver's "search-and-act" idiom is just more sophisticated, and makes a greater contribution to UI design, than does Enso's. Sorry, command completion? Not revolutionary.
jacobolus 19y ago
First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills. Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that, experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new application, with its own ideas. Third, what the hell is Launchy?
- pius 19y ago
  When people say, "I wish Windows had something like Quicksilver," Launchy is usually what gets brought up in response. http://www.launchy.net/ http://www.launchy.net/
- tptacek 19y ago
  It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X. In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.
  - mwerty 19y ago
    Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.
    - tptacek 19y ago
      Ok, let's all have a debate about neurosurgery!
      - mwerty 19y ago
        If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?

downer 19y ago

I wonder if a retargeted GTK library would allow you to run The Gimp as an AJAX application; either that or perhaps a Flash FreeNX client. Ulteo made OpenOffice work online: http://lifehacker.com/software/online-documents/use-openoffice-online-with-ulteo-332841.php http://lifehacker.com/software/online-documents/use-openoffi...

tx 19y ago
Gimp as AJAX application? Jesus... not only this sentence makes no sense ("AJAX" is just one stupid function call), but the idea of running everything "online" is just silly. WHY would I want to screw myself in the butt by using "online apps" for editing my digital camera photos? Why would I want to wait hours for 2GB of photos to get uploaded at 35kb/sec and then limit myself to a pathetic subset of perfectly functioning desktop application? Because there are many techies out there who are greedy and fail to innovate, preferring to re-implement tiny fractions of existing software instead. And burning someone else's millions in the process. I will not be surprised if we'll see hard drive formatting utilities, backed by VC millions, running inside of the browser, so you can "Format your Drive from Anywhere!!!" A lot of Valley people need to stop drinking kool-aid and read uncov.com more often.
- SwellJoe 19y ago
  Yeah, because nobody wants to upload and store their photos on the web--so they certainly don't want to be able to edit them once stored there. You're just missing the point by a mile. Online photo editing is a great feature for people who have already committed their entire photo collection to flickr (or one of the other several dozen competitors). There will come a time when photos are mostly taken by cell phone cameras, uploaded on the spot, and never dealt with except in an online form. An online editor is the only sane solution. But, I agree that porting GIMP to forward its UI out to a browser is madness. Writing a GTK to JavaScript layer is probably significantly harder than writing an image editor from scratch in pure JavaScript or Flash (at least the 20% solution that'll satisfy 80% of users).
  - tx 19y ago

derefr 19y ago

This sounds like a review of Fireworks: "...The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must manually dississed [sic]; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below the menu-bar and doesn't interrupt your work. The first method is horrible, the second is decent." "For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to work when you click on them, but they don't have any effect unless you already have text selected." "Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text objects." (Excepting the fact that empty (sub-)layers in Fireworks are destroyed when you exit them.) "...there are "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons at the top of the screen, and nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons" and "you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked region in the extreme corner."

herdrick 19y ago

When you want a really powerful tool, you usually have to accept a tougher learning curve. Yes, most web apps should be immediately understandable, their features laid plain to the first-time user. The problem is, advanced image editing involves a ton of UI moving parts. I think most of what those guys complain about are things where Splashup carefully follows the Photoshop UI. I think these web UI guys aren't approaching Splashup in the right way.