Ubuntu Studio Art Manager

[Kiernan Holland]

>
> >
> > What's naive about simplicity?
> >
> Simplicity is not always the best.  Some things need to be complex.
> Ardour, Blender, Pro-Tools, Autocad, these are examples of things that I
> believe are necessarily complex.  Of course I still believe that there
> is room for improvement in usability, but I do not think that simplicity
> should always be the goal.
>

Well you can't make a "make great music button".. But with Patchage, routing
audio can be quite easy.  Blender is only as complex as a 3D program
normally is, if you look at any other 3D package you will see that.  What
I'm talking about is not having to scour the folders of linux to get
something done. I also know that Linux is inspired by Unix, that simplified
computers by making everything a file, so simplicity takes different forms,
but there is need for higher-level access to the low-level system, and it
can be done without losing flexibility. For example using sliders to select
enumerated values rather than having to parse a text file which is more
error prone than using a program that has intimate knowledge of say a binary
file or a XML format. Gconf-editor and "about:config" in firefox are perfect
examples. One thing I've noticed about many artists and musicians, is that
they will learn a complex program if it gets the job done (so complex that a
programmer would have a hard time finding their way around in it), but they
cringe when having to navigate the internals of the Linux filesystem and
read text files and so on. So the solution is just a different interface
that doesn't require typing.


>
> > Some people make things complex for politics sake.. I thought Linux
> > would grow, if it could leave behind the politics of commercial
> > software development behind.. But I guess I was wrong.
> >
> Blind, slavish devotion to simplicity is also not a good perspective,
> you end up with neutered products that are not all that useful.  I
> wonder what you mean by "if it could leave behind the politics of
> commercial software development behind"?  Most open source developers
> that I know make software that they actually want to use, not something
> that was built to satisfy some sales or marketing checklist.
>

No, what I'm talking about is the focus on making things complex for the
sake of selling software.. It does occur.. Examples given.. In Enterprise
software development, companies will write software in obscure languages for
the sole purpose of avoiding being succeeded by outsourced coders in say
india, that would have access to C compilers (GCC), but wouldn't easily have
access to something like Delphi or C# .

There are other examples of unecessary complexity, such as what Java was
supposed to be, and what it is.  The minute Sun decided to deprecate any arm
of the Java tree, they disobeyed the assumption that Java was "write once,
run anywhere". They did this for commercial reasons, I'm sure. But there is
no reason to drop accessibility to features, unless you are worried about
support and believe people will get confused and such.  I doubt it has
anything to do with efficiency, pointers allow for simplicity and
efficiency, if we had not used memory pointers, modern computing would not
be possible. And what is an arm of options in a programming language than a
library, and a pointer to the library.

Sorry confusing this with programmers you know.. But there are some in the
linux crowd who I believe don't see any reason in fixing things because it
let in the simple-minded wackos. And that's politics. But the truth is, if
you want linux to be adopted, it doesn't have to be like a Mac or Windows,
things just need to be more accessible, by other interfaces. The example I
gave above was "typing" can be a barrier to entry. How many people do you
know who can and can't type, then how many people do you know who can type,
but can't manage the interaction with the computer. Each hurdle reduces the
size of your audience.

For the record, I once blew up my Amiga 1000 keyboard (cause it has a phone
jack, and I connected it to the phone jack terminal), and was able to make
music with it for a year without the use of the keyboard. The only time I
had to use the keyboard was to save files, and I used copy and paste on the
file requester.

My website http://www.chann3lz.com/ , permits people to contribute their
tastes in music and video, without the use of a keyboard, most everything is
links. It also permits anyone from around the world to share their favorites
through the use of bookmarklets and if they choose. How do you experience
the best music from parts of the world with any other interface, especially
if you don't know the culture or the language?  On my site, you can perform
additive/subtractive tag searches on youtube from the search system without
typing. It's a ugly site, I admit, but it serves the purpose, and I don't
keep page hits on the popularity, but you can check the FEEDJIT below the
page. I'm guessing somewhere in the range of about 200,000 judging from my
bandwidth use and the page size in bytes.

BTW, blender is a lot easier now than it used to be. But I also know how to
use the old blender too. I know how to do UV texturing on objects without
the UV texturing interface, it was called Sticky textures, it utilized the
projection of the camera coordinates onto a mesh, and the application of the
texture with UV mapping on, it wasn't pretty, but it offered UV texturing
support in absence of an interface for UV texturing. At that time, the only
other freeware alternative 3D package was POV-ray.
Also, blender was created after Ton decided that it would be better to write
his own 3D software in-house than to buy a seat of Wavefront TAV, which he
got a free trial for two weeks. He used the money his company had to buy an
SGI workstation. blender is a better program partially because it is open
source, but more than 50% of the features that still exist are there because
they were needed for real work. It wasn't until he decided to develop
blender as a freeware application full time, that he parted ways with his
media company NeoGeo. He had originally thought he'd open source it, but
decided that it was much to complex to be useful, so he developed it until
it could be used, then tried to make a commercial application out of it,
that didn't fly. His company NaN went bankrupt, the VC took the program and
vaulted it. Then Ton begged that the program would serve no greater purpose
than to have its sources released. He was able to convince the VC to open
the sources, to the tune of about 86,000 dollars, provided by fans of the
software.

But after that, he continued to try to keep control over the sources, and
obscure access to blender. It was users such as myself that cornered him,
and said "this really needs to be shared, this needs to be developed by
others, it needs to be accessible to the public, and so on". He then gave up
control, educated developers about the internals of blender, and such, and
the users and developers gave him authority over the direction for blender.
It succeeded because everyone was able to share in the effort, and users
could have their voices heard, rather than being ignored, which is why in
the freeware end of blender that the package was earning a bad reputation,
because it lacked accessibility, it would not load or save any file formats,
without the use of python scripts, it lacked the features to make character
animation, it didn't support a lot of the video formats that other open
source packages had.. Also some features in the program like axis constraint
by middle click with a combined gesture was to hard for new users to pick up
(although I mastered it, regardless of perspective). I informed many users
in the early part of blender's use by providing tutorials and passing on
knowledge that Ton passed onto me first hand. I've got long emails on DAT
tapes of my discussions with Ton, one of these days I should get them out.
But in the beginning of blender release, is had very little confidence in
it's adoption. It took others to see the value in what he had.
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