As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it. For instance, VLC still forces you to kill the process when it can't find all of the files in a playlist (if you deleted them from your desktop). When you restart the app, if you hit play you will have the same problem. This happens to me all the time. It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.
> As much as I love VLC, them blowing off the lack of UI polish is why I have a love/hate relationship with it.
Good, you will be happy to know that we're redoing the UI for 4.0, to fix UX issues. And the issue you mentioned is fixed in last version and better fixed in 4.0.
> but there seems to be no interest.
That is totally not true. We listen a lot to user feedback, but we are understaffed compared to the project size. It is getting better, and the biggest issues (like the one you mentioned) are all getting fixed.
I only made the comment about the lack of interest because of how long these issues have existed, and I certainly don't think any of us are entitled to a better UI if it's not a priority at the moment. You guys have my utmost respect for your efforts and I'm happy to hear some of the noted improvements are also high on my list of wants.
Comments like these are a good illustration why work on open source projects is such an ungrateful task. Yes, you have a point, and I'm sure all your gripes are accurate. But in spite of all of that you still got a product for free and who are you to determine that it wouldn't take much to address all those nitpick issues?
And yes, of course there is interest (see the answer to your comment), but resources are finite and many of these projects have a very small fraction of the budget of even the smallest commercial operation.
It also goes a long way to explaining why the leaders of so many open source projects are vulnerable when sleazy marketers come around waving life-changing amounts of money.
When one gets little help and support and it feels like ungrateful demands are the only thing anyone ever contributes, it's not hard to see why one might just take the money and ghost.
A moment of respect for what jbk personally passed up to keep VLC free for us.
I'd like to ungratefully demand that jbk take the money offered in exchange for putting malware in the Windows installer and then spend said money hiring developers to make the Linux experience better. It's a nuanced, centrist ungrateful demand.
While I don't exactly contribute to open source at the moment, I do provide tools for various communities I'm in. I take feedback and critiques very seriously and do my best to understand what my community really wants. I think my tone might have come off a bit strong, but my frustration is more out of love for the product. I don't think the UI needs a ton a polish, but if they focused on some nagging issues (that don't appear to need complex fixes), the experience would be substantially better.
> It's a shame because it would not take much to address all of the nitpick issues I have with it, but there seems to be no interest.
Comments like these never fail to bring a smile to my face. Someone who doesn't understand the project / issue decides it is easy and people should care about their personal grievances for a program they have not paid a single cent for
You seriously think that adding some checks to account for missing files in a playlist is a hard thing? I know it's probably a bit more involved than that, but lets be serious here. I'm not asking for much. I do think making the assumption that they don't care about this stuff was not exactly the tone I was looking for, but I do think some obvious UI issues have taken a back seat.
Just because it's an OSS project does not mean it's beyond reproach. I contribute free software myself and never once felt that I was above my users. I don't think the VLC guys are this way one bit, but your suggestion that I should not be talking about any of my minor gripes is ridiculous.
I contribute to free software. When a user asks me to change something, most of the time I am quite happy to do that. Sometimes a user asks me to change something, with the message that it is easy and won't take much time. Those requests get instantly put on the backburner, and maybe a year later I start working on them. It really irks me the wrong way.
Just an analogy... Suppose on a nice summer sunday afternoon, you are walking or cycling on the country side. You come past a farm, and they have free apples on the side of the road that you can take with you. You pick one, but find that there is a bad spot on that apple. First thing you do is throw it against the front wall of the farm. The farmer comes outside and you tell him he should be more carefull in picking apples, it is easy to do that and won't take much time. Next week you are there again, and there are no free apples anymore.
VLC has minor issues (though it’s MacOS support has gotten much better over the years) - but as far as FOSS software goes it has among the best UI/UX along with FireFox.
I’d say there seems to be far less interest in improving, in particular, the UX (not even UI, but UX specifically) of usability disasters like Gimp or Blender.
sigh - this might sound tough to say, but, I’m not ready to give Blender another shot.
I’m hardly ready to give Gimp another shot - I doubt, at this point, either of these releases will phase me or my use - I’ve simply been too disappointed with them both for more than 15 years of trying every new version, that they would probably literally need a new name to get me to use them.
I get a bad taste in my mouth when I think about Gimp or Blender - I unfortunately only have terrible memories of frustratingly trying to do basic tasks like make a selection or move an object around, to the point where I hear the word ‘Blender’ like I’d hear the word ‘Wasp’ - a little cringe of bad memories and something to be avoided.
I think it’s been almost 18 years of trying Gimp on a yearly basis on multiple platforms only to be baffled how rudimentary user-level functions are so fundamentally broken.
It must sound like I’m really bashing this software, and I’m not - I am appreciative of everyone who puts an effort into the important and often thankless work of FOSS - but part of the point of the FOSS movement is to demonstrate its feasibility to replace the equivalent paid software. This is also critical to its growth, evolution, and support. Firefox, VLC, and, to an extent, OpenOffice, have achieved this tremendously.
Due to the overwhelming complexity of the tasks it sets to achieve, Blender’s usability atrocities can be pushed aside. Not so with Gimp.
OpenOffice, for example, is somewhere in the middle, but both ways - the functionality and the UI/UX are both ‘good enough’, and I can hand it to my Grandma instead of Word and she will hardly notice.
I think the major point for me here, is that this is why there’s an age old saying that FOSS is made by geeks, for geeks, and we will never have ‘the year of Linux’.
That’s because usability these days is basically on par with functionality, because with so many frameworks and software options available, even if something half-works - people will still prefer the half working, usable thing, to something that works great and literally seems to change its mind on what function does what depending on some extremely random-seeming context.
Photoshop’s UI/UX is shit to start. I’ve often stated it’s a piece of software you must have someone basically show you the first time how to use - then it’s okay. That we have only this to really compare Gimp’s state of awfulness to, indicates, unfortunately, the depth of the shithole Gimp’s UX is really in.
I’m a UI/UX dev, and I find these pieces of software unusable, and, perhaps especially due to my education on the subject, actively frustrating to try to use - I pray to think what would happen if I gave, let’s say, my girlfriend, who does Photography and Graphic design, a copy of Gimp to replace Photoshop. She’d probably leave me for even putting her through the experience. /s
Again, though, OpenOffice vs. Word? No problem.
tl;dr:
Usability has to go hand in hand with functionality in development, or there is a risk in the brand simply becoming a ‘bad name.’
If Gimp 3 might actually be usable, I’d personally go for a name change. I see people in IT visibly cringe when I mention it.
It's totally subjective of course, but I really like the lack of UI polish in VLC. To me it makes it feel like a real, powerful tool. Clearly the process killing thing is a straight up bug that should be fixed, but I do hope VLC retains its utilitarian aesthetic.
I'm not the parent commenter, but I'll take a crack it at. Some of the mpd and similar command line utilities (as well as those that get a little more flashy like ncmpd or another front end) are usually pretty simple and low resource. VLC can do everything, which makes it a gigantic swiss army knife chainsaw thing, but most of the time I can get away with something lighter.
That said, VLC is still pretty good. It handles the various webm, mkv, mp3, mp4, plus whatever else I've got floating around in /home without losing a beat.
I guess, with how powerful it is, and how small of a bundle it is, I’ve never had any reason not to use it.
I’ve never opened media files from a command line, personally.
The ‘Swiss army knife’ approach is why I love VLC - the knowledge I can throw literally any file at it and it will just open is very satisfying. iTunes/QuickTime just don’t make that cut, even with Perian. (is that still a thing?)
The story of all idealistic open source software, same with Gimp, which is unusable for professional work. Them using the word "beautiful" to describe a well designed UI is telling and it really is an attitude problem among programmers.
100,000 hours spent on programming the underlying features, 0 hours on actually making it usable.
No, before GimpShop, I’d argue Gimp has had the worst native UI/UX I’ve used next to Blender, and I mostly do UI/UX for a living.
Bizarre keyboard shortcuts, awful ‘stay-on-top’ window behaviour when tabbing between applications. ‘Copy’ copies the inversion of the selection by default. Dragging a selection drags the rest of the image. The default behaviour of most tools is inverse to any previously established behaviour.
I’ve used Gimp thousands of times over 15-some years, in some cases for professional projects, and under the hood it is very good, but for many years it’s UI/UX made it literally the most bottom rung tool I would possibly choose to use for graphics manipulation - only when I absolutely had to. (I remember using Gimp in between the PowerPC -> Intel transition, where CS2’s performance on my Intel Mac Pro was worse than my iBook, and Gimp had a Universal Binary before Adobe did...)
I learned GIMP, through tooth and nail, and, knowing it well, I can still say through and through, especially historically, Gimp has been nothing short of a mess to use. I’m still not used to the idea that selecting and dragging something moves the rest of the image, not the selection itself.
I don’t want to learn to make an exception for Gimp as opposed to every other graphics application on the planet I’ve used since MS Paint, and I am certainly not the only individual criticizing particularly the glaring UX issues within Gimp.
Now, Blender, I’ve tried to take a dozen or so YouTube tutorials, and read dozens of articles on, and it just makes me want to hurl my MacBook Pro across the room every time. I was never able to accomplish anything serious in Blender the way I did with Gimp, which is why I put Gimp as the second worst UI/UX I’ve ever tolerated.
I tend to learn high value software. At this point, there have been so darn many UX paradigms... OK fine.
Unless there is an actual use bug, like things do not work, for high value software, it pays to just work the thing the way it works.
All improvements welcome, of course. And the interesting there is I hope they are good, not just a pretty pass, or rearrange. That takes time to remap. It is nice when it is time well spent.
I tend to give a wide berth to high value tools I get to use gratis.
Funding good UX would be a huge step, I think, I personally pay my CC subscription, because I use PS every day constantly for my work, easily make far over and above the subscription cost using the software, and it’s useable - I unfortunately literally mean that Gimp makes me actively frustrated to use.
‘Selecting selects the opposite’, is, to me, a use bug, among with many other designers and developers (a quick Google search confirms this).
I wish I had the time myself to go in and look at it, I really do. I’m sure it’s the same for a few folks. I love and support FOSS and I wish I could get behind GIMP like I can VLC.
But VLC managed to make itself a daily driver, even from this interview’s description, by being usable.
Gimp isn’t usable unless I’m going to dedicate myself to it. Functionally, there’s no reason I can’t use it and Photoshop interchangeably for the same task.
But when that same task takes me two or three times longer because I’m fighting with the UX, and design time is money, Adobe can unfortunately take my money for now.
Yeah, but you know what it does. So deal and flow? That is precisely what I do.
Most of us have seen it all done a bazillion ways. I go all the way back to floppies, TV for a monitor and separate application and data disks.
Even a lame UI is presenting me with fast, potent tools!
If there is value there, the learning follows, then stuff gets done, next. It is hard the first few times. Easier after that. Almost no worry now. "How does this one do it?" K, next, done.
Hard to complain about pretty great tools I can use, modify, etc. for a song and small investment in how the tool works.
Or don't, right?
Adobe is happy for your money, and parting with it is worth more than some time sorting GIMP out.
This isn't necessarily about Gimp, but this is a general problem with software developers creating tools for their domain.
It is easy to create a tool that is specifically tailored to your workflow, because for parts that may tough to code, you manually take care of it. It becomes harder to generalize that tool for public use. It is harder still to add good UX that lets novices pick it up and begin working.
It seems easy, because the ubiquitous tools, libraries and frameworks have years of planning and experience to learn from.
That's some baseless assertions if ever there were any. Gimp, Inkscape, VLC, Blender. All open source, all used by enthusiasts and professionals all over the world. Maybe not in the same quantity as that of their open source counterparts, but used by enough people to be counted nonetheless. When it comes to VLC, I dare say, it might even beat its commercial counterparts.
In fact I've found that a lot of the professionals that refuse to go near the OS version are a hell of a lot less skilled than those that enjoy the benefits of the GPL'd versions.
Open Source apps are very popular in enterprise and professional circles.
