Splashup reviewd by a User Interface blog. - It's pretty rough | Hacker News Reader

Splashup reviewd by a User Interface blog. - It's pretty rough

humanized.com

9 pointsReadmore20 comments

Not trying to pick on anyone. It's just good to hear honest feedback, especially about an interface.

This sounds like a review of Fireworks:

"...The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must manually dississed [sic]; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below the menu-bar and doesn't interrupt your work. The first method is horrible, the second is decent."

"For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to work when you click on them, but they don't have any effect unless you already have text selected."

"Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text objects." (Excepting the fact that empty (sub-)layers in Fireworks are destroyed when you exit them.)

"...there are "Apply" and "Cancel" buttons at the top of the screen, and nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons" and "you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked region in the extreme corner."

When you want a really powerful tool, you usually have to accept a tougher learning curve. Yes, most web apps should be immediately understandable, their features laid plain to the first-time user. The problem is, advanced image editing involves a ton of UI moving parts. I think most of what those guys complain about are things where Splashup carefully follows the Photoshop UI. I think these web UI guys aren't approaching Splashup in the right way.

I wonder if a retargeted GTK library would allow you to run The Gimp as an AJAX application; either that or perhaps a Flash FreeNX client.

Ulteo made OpenOffice work online: http://lifehacker.com/software/online-documents/use-openoffi...

Gimp as AJAX application? Jesus... not only this sentence makes no sense ("AJAX" is just one stupid function call), but the idea of running everything "online" is just silly.

WHY would I want to screw myself in the butt by using "online apps" for editing my digital camera photos? Why would I want to wait hours for 2GB of photos to get uploaded at 35kb/sec and then limit myself to a pathetic subset of perfectly functioning desktop application?

Because there are many techies out there who are greedy and fail to innovate, preferring to re-implement tiny fractions of existing software instead. And burning someone else's millions in the process.

I will not be surprised if we'll see hard drive formatting utilities, backed by VC millions, running inside of the browser, so you can "Format your Drive from Anywhere!!!"

A lot of Valley people need to stop drinking kool-aid and read uncov.com more often.

Yeah, because nobody wants to upload and store their photos on the web--so they certainly don't want to be able to edit them once stored there.

You're just missing the point by a mile. Online photo editing is a great feature for people who have already committed their entire photo collection to flickr (or one of the other several dozen competitors). There will come a time when photos are mostly taken by cell phone cameras, uploaded on the spot, and never dealt with except in an online form. An online editor is the only sane solution.

But, I agree that porting GIMP to forward its UI out to a browser is madness. Writing a GTK to JavaScript layer is probably significantly harder than writing an image editor from scratch in pure JavaScript or Flash (at least the 20% solution that'll satisfy 80% of users).

Wow, I am surprised I did not get downvoted into oblivion for my previous post. However, I am convinced that you're missing a point by a mile.

Nobody has committed their photo collections to flickr, because it is insane: people generate gigabytes of images with their cameras and upload only a tiny fraction of what they have, most of the time downsampled to a manageable size. Moreover, the sizes of image files (JPEGs) keep growing, while uploading speeds have stuck at 20-60kb/sec for 95% users.

This pattern is true not only for images, it's true for everything: the speed at which people generate data is only accelerating - from simple text documents we've moved to music, images, video and god knows what else. Sticking everything into the "cloud" will not work. Even today an average PC has tens of gigabytes of data. Soon that number will reach terabytes. Think about X-megapixel cameras, recorded TV shows, HD-movies, etc. The size of the backup drives will keep growing, while the speeds of internet connections will not.

Internet is a distributed computing platform with very powerful computing nodes (your computers). The opportunities of exploiting this are fascinating. SETI is a great example of using Internet right. Skype and torrents are another ones.

What these cloud companies are doing, however, is plain stupid in comparison: they're sucking in the computational complexity from "powerful nodes" only to re-distribute the load on their end onto their own nodes without any hope to keep up. What for?

I know that Microsoft is out of fashion today, but Ray Ozzie is absolutely right when he is talking about maintaining a reasonable (sane!) balance between client machines and "clouds". This point of view is not terribly popular among some YC readers, who are too fascinated and tempted by a slight chance of getting rich by re-implementing 2% of some perfectly fine desktop software in 2 months with a handful of python scripts running on cheap Amazon servers.

> "AJAX" is just one stupid function call

XMLHttpRequest() is one function call. AJAX in this context implies a rather serious JavaScript application. I note you didn't respond to the FreeNX alternate idea. Apparently there's already MozNX, a Mozilla plugin, so that would actually take care of the display (at the cost of another plugin).

I have an even better idea, though: A bootable Linux flash drive that connects to FreeNX running on your own EC2 instance with a deniably-encrypted filesystem (TrueCrypt). You can pop it in any borrowed computer and it just acts as a terminal, with your software running on EC2 and displaying remotely on your system.

Then you can have access to your apps and data anywhere and don't have to worry about spyware or keyloggers on unknown systems (except hardware keyloggers) and only pay for the hours you actually use the system.

(If you don't trust EC2 with personal data -- since you never know who else is going to be on your same Xen host -- then use whatever co-located machine you set up yourself, also with TrueCrypt; although without the machine in your physical control at all times, it could be compromised regardless -- not to mention trojans planted in your binary distro of choice.)

Again: Why? Why do programmers think that "from anywhere" matters so much? Sure "from anywhere" has some value, but it comes at enormous expense: unbelievable reduction in functionality. Please take a look at my previous post - I think that by pushing everything onto datacenters we're moving backwards, not forward.

Whenever you're designing an application, a true problem solver, you have the entire internet at your disposal. Your servers, and computers of your customers - all that combined RAM, CPU power and hard drives - they are all yours. USE IT and innovate. As opposed to taking something that already exists, adding "from everywhere!!!!" feature, slapping "wait... loading..." animation onto, and chopping 90% of the remaining features off.

Good example would be crap by Zoho. The proper way of doing it would be taking MS Office or Open Office and adding powerful collaboration features into them - the possibilities are enormous: you can have a rich UI, tons of processing power AND simultaneous document access, collaboration, sharing, backup, etc.

Instead we have a bunch of cowboy javascript coders reinventing a barely working wheel (one side) and Microsoft/Sun dumbly continuing to ignore Internet in their respective "office" groups.

That's why I suggested using FreeNX and a bootable flash drive, then you DO have all the power on the back-end and aren't limited to a browser on the front end.

Are these reviews by the same team that tried to clone Quicksilver for Windows and wound up with nothing more than Launchy set in Garamond?

Ow. That's harsh. They also did http://www.songza.com/ , which I think is pretty elegant.

Here's the response to the Quicksilver Clone accusations: http://humanized.com/weblog/2007/11/01/enso-quicksilver-for-...

At the end of the day, these guys are pretty sharp about UI, IMO-- whether they cloned something or not.

Enso seemed to just show a lot of idiosyncratic ideas about how UI design "should" be. The idea that the user should type some extra command, or hold down some extra key -- that's all crap. I'm a loyal Quicksilver user who bought into their arguments and tried using Enso at work on WinXP for a few weeks, and Quicksilver beats Enso hands down. Quicksilver just works and is friendly, whereas Enso tries to convert you to their quirky UI cult.

I like the idea behind Enso's "commands", but why the hell make it mandatory? Make the default action what the user expects by default, and allow the user to override it in exceptional cases -- a la Quicksilver!

I was being deliberately rude and snarky about Humanized, who, let it be said, can choose contrasting color saturations with the greatest of ease, and can "collect user interface evidence" circles around my command-line ass.

But I agree, I think their attempt to position Enso versus Quicksilver is weak. If Quicksilver was ported to Windows, nobody would use Enso; the marginal cost of that particular value prop for Windows users is already zero, and Quicksilver's "search-and-act" idiom is just more sophisticated, and makes a greater contribution to UI design, than does Enso's. Sorry, command completion? Not revolutionary.

First, this is a silly ad hominem criticism; their arguments have little to do with their Enso application. But either way, these humanized guys are in general on top of things, and their thoughts about interface design are usually quite insightful. Implementing good interfaces, and insightfully criticizing interfaces, are two very different skills.

Second, while I personally love Quicksilver, it has a significant learning curve. Enso's model is, for better or worse, rather simpler. And beyond that, experimentation is good. A direct clone of Quicksilver would be both out of place on windows, and also much less interesting to create than a new application, with its own ideas.

Third, what the hell is Launchy?

When people say, "I wish Windows had something like Quicksilver," Launchy is usually what gets brought up in response. http://www.launchy.net/

It's not an ad-hominem when someone publishes a critique of X, and you allege that they haven't demonstrated that they are qualified to critique X.

In this case, it might be WRONG to allege that. But it's not an ad-hominem.

Arguments about the topic matter. Qualifications of the people don't.

Ok, let's all have a debate about neurosurgery!

If what you have to say about neurosurgery makes sense, what's the problem?

And, hey, what's with "a direct clone of Quicksilver would be out of place on Windows"? No it wouldn't. It would be more appropriate. Quicksilver on the Mac competes with a lot of well-thought-out workflow that already exists in the OS X interface. Quicksilver on Windows would add far more value. And the QS "search-and-act" idiom is universal.

Have you used Quicksilver? You should. It's pretty amazing.

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