[ohkine]

My problems with VLC go beyond the interface, but its hideous UI is a major reason why i don't use it (i'm on OS X). I have seen many many people online try to work around this problem, at least aesthetically, by skinning or editing NIBs or whatever -- have any VLC developers attempted to court those people? Have you considered just asking them if they'd be willing to help? Or if they would be OK with having their NIBs incorporated into the official project?

edit: Another problem that i didn't think of when i wrote the above is that, since VLC is a multi-platform application, any SERIOUS interface changes -- changes to work flow, arrangement of options and menus and the like -- need to be copied over to the other platforms.

For instance, VLC's transcoding function, whilst very featureful, is incredibly irritating to use, interface-wise. Suppose i had the solution to this, and i provided it to VLC. That's step one, but in order to get that actually put into the product, not only do i need to have done my part, but then you need presumably multiple programmers to actually get it implemented in the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions.

[jbk]

OS X version of VLC is unmaintained, because the mac community doesn't care about it...

Editing a NIB and not making it open source, is near useless for the community...

Not to mention that the developers don't have to court those people, it should be the other way around... They should propose their design. This goes for everyone, developers, translators, technical writors... Why would designers be different?

Finally, about the transcode part, this is not a designing issue, but a usability issue...

[ohkine]

> OS X version of VLC is unmaintained, because the mac community doesn't care about it...

Do you mean the Mac development community, or the Mac user community? Because based on my admittedly anecdotal research, i would say that the latter almost certainly do care. Why none of the developers have stepped forward, i don't know -- maybe they feel like their talents would be wasted given the past administration of the Mac client? Maybe they think it's a hopeless cause? Have the VLC team made it clear what sort of developer they're after? Do they want someone to just expose their functionality changes to the OS X version, or do they want someone to take charge of the OS X version, in the same way that Transmission's Mac UI team take charge of their OS X version?

> Editing a NIB and not making it open source, is near useless for the community...

Of course it is. But why do you think people do that? If they felt that the work they were doing anyway could influence the design direction of the official VLC project, wouldn't they jump at the idea? Almost certainly they would. They don't because they feel like no-one at VLC cares about their work. (And given that the OS X version is unmaintained, i guess that's true.) They don't know that they have the opportunity to use their talents to make more meaningful contributions to VLC.

> Not to mention that the developers don't have to court those people, it should be the other way around... They should propose their design. This goes for everyone, developers, translators, technical writors... Why would designers be different?

There is a well-known path for developers to submit their contributions. Everybody knows it, it's understood, it's easily accessible for people who do their sort of work. A designer is less familiar with these processes.

Not only that, but a designer can't implement their changes on their own. Any random developer can look up a bug on a tracker and write a self-contained patch that gets merged with the trunk and then boom it's fixed. That's not how interface design works. A random designer can submit mock-ups or image files to a bug tracker, but they require another person -- a developer -- to actually put their ideas into action. This is a much larger barrier to entry.

> Finally, about the transcode part, this is not a designing issue, but a usability issue...

It is not an aesthetic issue, no. But the work flow -- the steps you need to take to complete an action -- is another aspect of interface design.