Monday September 17, 2007 
Stratocaster
Rich Sands' blog. Thoughts on community development, strategy, gardening, food, and whatever else comes to mind.
Monday September 17, 2007 Joining the Church of Macintosh
Mark Wielaard just IM'ed me and said "What??? No Stratocaster update yet?" He and several others have been on my case to resurrect this blog and start commenting on... stuff. So here I am... peer pressure works! Eventually. I promised Mark I would post, and I gotta start sometime. And sometime is right now. So here I am again!
My wife and I bought our first Apple Macintosh this past weekend. The huge (almost too big) 24-inch new iMac. In for a penny, in for a pound. Why am I switching from one proprietary (Windows) OS to another even more proprietary (Mac OS X) OS after having been immersed in the open source world now for over 3 years? When guys like Tom Marble have been begging me to switch to Ubuntu Linux? Well... Windows Vista finally pushed me over the edge. After what I've read about it, and the years of aggravation I've had running XP, I just am having no part of it. So where to now?
I have Ubuntu on my Toshiba laptop. It installed fine, found all the hardware. Even the WiFi worked out of the box. But after messing with it for awhile I realized it was going to take me several hours of goofing with dialog boxes and watching installation scripts run to get it into productive shape. Its not like I'm a dummy when it comes to computers - I'm a power user, and I've got a lot of friends who know everything there is to know about them and can give me help and advice at the drop of a hat. But the thought of making Ubuntu into a productive tool that fits my work style was... well, just not appetizing.
Some other colleagues and friends have long been members of the Church. They've been inviting me to join... and find meaning in my computing life. Ray Gans in particular has been telling me how great the Mac is. And if Simon Phipps is a confirmed Mac-o-phile, then I guess I can use one too.
I am now wondering what took me so long. It is so well-designed, the software so smooth and effortless to use, it is almost like it reads my mind what I want to do. Usually, anything I want to do is one or two obvious clicks or drags without all that "hmmm how do I do that?" annoyance. The applications are just as easy to use as the OS itself. I get it. User experience really IS important.
So why is the user experience on the Mac so great, and on Ubuntu it is, well, not so great (though in fairness, not unusably bad either). Its not because open source software is inherently not easy to use. While Firefox doesn't have the buttery smooth intuitiveness of a Mac application, it is certainly easy to use. But the hallmark of Firefox is its extensibility and the community that has developed around it, not its ease of use. I know that Canonical and the Ubuntu community are working hard to make Ubuntu desktop easy to use as well and has made great progress. But any Linux distro is going to be made up of mostly applications and components that come from many sources, many developers, with different ideas of what is easy and what is not. Some are easy for power users but not for newbies. A few are only easy for their authors. Some are genuinely easy, but still different from other software written by other developers. What makes the Mac so easy is very careful, tested design, and absolute consistency. You can intuit how to do almost anything, and no matter where you are or what you're using, it works the same way.
It seems to me that great user experience is inherently not something that emerges naturally from the hurly-burly world of open source development. Different developers think they know the best way to do something and don't want to be constrained by others' ideas on usability. Or they want to experiment with different approaches. Or whatever - it doesn't matter why all those Linux applications are different. They are. So how to reconcile the need for great user experience - which requires discipline and consistency - with the open source development model? I don't know the answer - but I suspect that a combination of a community-invented (by open development usability nerds) UI specification and guidelines for Linux applications, coupled with intense peer pressure for projects to conform to these guidelines might be a start.
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Hi!
What signature model is that stratocaster? :)
Btw, what linux still needs is someone who wants to pay UI designers.
The applications are there, most do what you need, and do the job very well. The problem is UI inconsistency and sometimes stupid choices that are no fault of anyone, because who writes the applications is not an UI artist, is a programmer.
Distributions should start paying UI designers and, yes, try to write a well thought guideline on UI that works across desktops.
Still in 2007, if I use kopete to connect to, say, msn, but otherwise I use evolution and gnome, I loose the ability to share contact address informations. This is a shame, as it would be really easy to just define a common library to abstract data from the applications (a thing we are good to say, see OOo open doc, but not as good in doing, it seems).
Posted by Mario Torre on September 17, 2007 at 09:51 AM PDT #
I absolutely agree.. In fact I remember while sitting next to you at OSCON having a strong desire to, during the Ubuntu keynote, get up and ask a question about this very effect. I didn't feel it strongly enough, and someone else got up to ask a somewhat related question, and the answer was along the lines of "We'd love it for Computer-Human-Interface specialists to become involved". I think, though, that the lack of UI smoothness isn't rooted at Ubuntu because they're simply incorporating and bundling software other people make. There's a whole fleet of various applications from Gnumeric (spreadsheet) to Kamarok to Audacity to Scribus to the little applications like the KDE calculator versus Gnome calculator etc etc ... those applications are being incorporated into various distributions.. so if a specific distribution like Ubuntu were to try and set up a common UI paradigm / style, they'd have to go to all those projects and get them to go along, and at the same time each of those projects are being incorporated into all these distros each of which may have differing ideas on the appropriate common UI paradigm/style. I'd expect Linspire wants a different UI paradigm than Ubuntu.
Posted by David Herron on September 17, 2007 at 11:29 AM PDT #
FWIW, at home I also use a Mac. Welcome to the club.
Posted by David Herron on September 17, 2007 at 11:31 AM PDT #
@David: You're right - few of the UI "ease of use" issues are rooted with Ubuntu, but Ubuntu does a fair job of getting suggestions and bug reports back to the projects, as well as to other distros. So it's a convenient place to start when submitting or reviewing bugs.
I read Christopher Avery's book _Teamwork is an Individual Skill_ this past weekend. (Highly recommended, BTW.) He probably wasn't thinking of Free Software/Open Source when he wrote it, but his description of Extraordinary Collaboration fits Ubuntu quite well!
My personal take is that FLOSS has a better long-term potential than anything else going right now. But still has some significant issues for the short-term, especially in the U.S.
-james.
Posted by James Stansell on September 17, 2007 at 04:27 PM PDT #
This old (2004) article by John Gruber actually gets at some of the roots of the problem. There's a minor followup too.
http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/sundry_spray_on
The basic gist is that usability in GUI software is not something you can just tack on at the end. "UI development *is* the hard part. And it’s not the last step, it’s the first step."
Personally I think Ubuntu is making great strides, but it still feels like a bit of an empty shell. I know what you mean: it's not instantly usable -- it takes a lot of customization and tweaking and installation of components to get it where you want it to be. I don't have a lot of patience for that any more. I want a computer that gets out of my way.
Posted by Drew Thaler on September 19, 2007 at 08:30 AM PDT #
I remember reading that John Gruber article at the time. Does he not use the printing system on OS X and Linux as an example of how you can't just spray usability onto a functional library, you need to bake it in from the start?
Somewhat ironic as printing on Mac OS X was decidedly dodgy (i.e. lack of functionality, not usability though obviously the latter suffers from the former) until they adopted CUPS and put a thin layer of Mac usability on top.
As a long time Mac user and usability fiend, who uses Ubuntu on my work desktop, I'd say that the lack of usability in Ubuntu is often overstated, when much of is it unfamiliarity, and significant parts are legal issues (codecs, Flash, Java, Wi-Fi hardware support).
The other part of it (as anyone who has used an internal business app will know) is that usability is hard. What's easy for humans is difficult for computers/programmers. Mac users have a culture of usability and therefore expect this extra effort, but people are naturaly lazy and if they can get away without this stuff they'll do so.
Posted by dave on September 20, 2007 at 01:57 AM PDT #
Welcome into the fold! ;-)
No matter how one stacks it, the UI principles & directives are the key to a truly meaningful tool. Even as something straight forward & seemingly obvious as a hammer or a flathead screwdriver can be easily misused.
The Mac OS X interface on the other hand seems to guide one effortlessly, almost a zen experience no?
It will be great to see how Leopard sets the bar for the next hop in UI design.
Enjoy!
p.s. don't forget to plug that strat into GarageBand & knock out a few tunes in between all the work! ;-)
Posted by Trent Turner on September 20, 2007 at 01:13 PM PDT #
Looks like a Mark Knopfler model to me.
Posted by Patrick on September 20, 2007 at 02:00 PM PDT #