[jzimdars]

He may be right. But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out. I think the biggest problem I have with it is that he's insulting and attacking the people who made these apps. There is no reason for that.

[roc]

> "But he's not adding any value for anyone the way he points it out."

It's a curious community we have. Pointing out problems or reporting visceral reaction is considered not constructive. Yet speculative re-designs to illustrate what the critic might have done differently are also considered not constructive.

It seems to me that when nothing short of actually competing against a product is considered useful or valid, the real argument is that criticism shouldn't exist and isn't useful in and of itself.

[rick_2047]

If you think about it carefully the emphasis here is not on if he should complain or not, the emphasis is on the way he should complain.

[blasdel]

So the people complaining about complaints over UI being about style instead of substance are themselves complaining about argumentative style instead of substance.

[rick_2047]

You still do not get the point here. His arguments may be valid, I don't know I never read the HIG nor am I a designer. But there is a way to do constructive criticism without belittling the efforts of other developers. He is acting like a "Chinese mom".

This line from HN guidelines illustrate my point:

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

I know that showing "attitude" and being cool is all the rage these days, but I still thinking politeness works like a charm.

[roc]

But even 'constructive' criticism is frequently derided here. That's why I made the point about speculative redesigns. No matter how polite or constructive you try to get, it seems a large chunk of this site will wave it off as being only as useful as reporting your gut feeling on whether something 'works' or 'doesn't'. (As only the designer facing actual decisions knows why they made certain compromises and has to deal with all the real permutations, etc)

You can narrow your argument to just "can't we all just be polite" and have a nice, if naive, point. But I disagree that the core complaints in the article or this thread are restricted to, or even primarily about, the tone.

[blasdel]

You're belittling RTFHIG like a "WASP mom" for belittling app authors like a "Chinese mom".

There's more than one way to show attitude, and politeness is one of them. It's an affectation, no different from RTFHIG's all-lowercase ironic outrage.

[jonhendry]

If the developers who made these apps were, instead, writing novels of similar quality, their work would have been coldly rejected by publisher after publisher after publisher after publisher.

1. If you're going to create, you need a thick skin for rejection and criticism, constructive or otherwise.

2. Everyone has a certain amount of shitty work that they need to work out of their system before they get good. If nobody tells them their crap work is crappy, they'll probably keep making it like that and won't improve.

3. Even successful novelists can get to a point where they stop being edited, and their work from that point tends to be flabby, overlong, and not well-regarded compared to earlier work that actually was edited.

[FiddlerClamp]

Nowadays they'd self-publish and would only have to worry about reviews from people who bought the book from Amazon (and many of them stack their book reviews with friends and family).

[jonhendry]

Well, that would be an option, but they probably wouldn't make much money, they wouldn't get the marketing support, and they wouldn't get the prestige of having published.

But that's a good point. The hideous Apps in the App Store are like the terrible self-published things that shows up in the Kindle store.

[nostromo]

> he's not adding any value

The point of the blog, from what I can tell, is to make people laugh. Let's lighten up.

Honestly, if I had an app in the store and it was featured here (with a handy backlink) I'd probably send him a thank you note for the free advertising and feedback.

[prawn]

First freelance job I did as a teenager (around 1996 maybe?) was for a sporting celebrity in my country. I got paid $90/hr which I was particularly excited about.

I spent so much time on this web interface, 'Shopping my brains out. The result was, for the time, amazing. People, who didn't have to use the site on a day-to-day basis, gushed.

Then I happened across an absolutely brutal, brutal review by some random on the net. At first I was crushed, but soon I realised that, though coarse, they had made good points and I became a better designer because of it.

[parfe]

Entertainment has value.

Not all time needs to be spent on productive endeavors. And maybe he just might increase the quality of these apps by shaming them into compliance. The devs might even read the HIG!

[statictype]

Maybe even Apple might read the HIG!

I think the bigger point here is that he's complaining about something which may not even be relevant any more. As John Gruber wrote recently, the HIG is dead and Apple is what killed it.

[jonhendry]

Consider the similar site Photoshop Disasters. That mocks the designers who make the images. But it's had value in pointing out the ludicrous editing that fashion ads and magazines are guilty of, twisting women's bodies into ridiculous impossible forms.

And, to some extent, has probably created some pressure on advertisers to not do that, because they'll be mocked.

[dustingetz]

there's at least one legitimate reason: it's getting him a ton of traffic!

[pedanticfreak]

I wouldn't accuse someone of adding no value when clearly the site would not exist if readers did not find it valuable enough to keep coming back. Or if the author didn't find it valuable to keep contributing.

Maybe you don't find it valuable for you. But clearly you found it interesting enough to stop and make a comment when so many other articles on "more valuable" subjects sit uncommented.