[api]

OSX demonstrates the power of design. Apple is a fashion company. Freedom is all good, but not if it looks like shit, and pretty much everything but Apple (at least as of the mid-2000s) looked like shit.

I am pleased with the overall design philosophy direction that Unity and Gnome 3 have taken in abandoning the 90s clutterbuck desktop in favor of something cleaner and more fluid, but both are immature. But if they can pull it together, and can be combined with the "ultrabook" movement to make non-Apple laptops not look like shit, then we might have something.

Also, look into cheap Chinese tablets like the "a-pad." If these could be flashed to run an open platform, then we'd have something there too.

But the big problem remains design. OSS is very good at innovation and infrastructure, but is very, very, VERY poor at user experience.

[marklindhout]

>> OSS is very good at innovation and infrastructure, but is very, very, VERY poor at user experience.

I agree with you here. As a designer, I have helped out FLOSS projects with UX design and usability. However, the environment is such that if you would suggest UX could be improved, the response often is that devs feel insulted because you are dissing their code (which is not the case, but they don't see that).

On the other hand, taking a look at WordPress, they invested quite some time in user testing and improving UX by professionals, and that makes it one of the most usable web publishing platforms out there.

So, it would be too easy to say all FLOSS is bad at UX, but most developers don't even see it as an actual discipline, and hence do not see a problem.

Nicer devs, that's the key :)

[slurgfest]

As a designer, I'm sure you recognize that not all feedback from someone who calls himself a designer is going to have equal quality, and shouldn't automatically get a pass. Also, you surely must know that a lot of design and UX critique is highly subjective...

Since you are here, I think you probably also understand that sometimes a complete redesign amounts to a large quantity of boring work, and that an open source developer might have set other priorities for future improvement, or just not see that much return on the time investment relative to other things which remain to be done.

The word for someone who is really nice to you and changes the whole project at your whim is 'employee' or 'contractor.' If I devised and have worked on an OSS project for years and some guy comes out of the blue basically saying that I should reallocate months of free labor in order to make something to someone else's tastes, can you not see why that would be the sort of suggestion I would take with a big grain of salt?

[slurgfest]

When the iMacs first came out, they were being lauded for their style. Of course, now that style looks horribly dated.

But people were always praising Apple products as good design, good user experience, even on the stuff we think is old and busted now.

The reason the recent Apple stuff looks cool now is that it is still the recent Apple stuff. In 10 years, it will look dated because it is so stylized, while things which are styled in a way which is 'boring' will still just be boring 10 years from now.

This should be an indicator that making things not "look like shit" is at least as much a matter of sensing or directing the style of the time, as it is fulfilling some objective criterion for good looks.

[derleth]

That's not universal, though: Apple is literally unusable for me and others because of design decisions that you can't really fix, simply because Apple.

It's high-handed. It's dictating to the user, and it's a reason (not the only reason) Apple won't ever be the only player in any market it enters.

[slurgfest]

Agreed!

For some people Apple's conventions align with their tastes, or clash with their tastes. I think many more people have a meta-preference to have everything just decided and encapsulated for them (sometimes literally encapsulated: not 'having to worry about' battery replacement, for example). These people greatly outnumber the people with a meta-preference to have everything customizable, or open source, or whatever.

If our culture becomes more technically savvy, then I think there will be a higher value placed on systems which offer sane defaults and present few degrees of freedom up-front (like Apple) BUT do provide hatches for users to get more control (like Apple alternatives).