On 6/5/07, E. Wing <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
They are not crippled until your change.
Well yesterday we couldn't get OSG examples running properly. Today Martin's run through seeing which ones worked with a double click and some run, but the ones that do don't find any fonts or textures. Its very very simple, if an example doesn't run as it does on other platforms its crippled. Most OSG examples are designed to be run from the command line, this keeps them simple and too the point - examples of how to use the OSG API.
You cannot double-click launch a non app bundle which makes bundless is crippled. Most Mac users will be confused or assume osg programs can't be double-clicked to launch. This is not good.
We aren't aimed at most Mac users, the OSG is for developers and developers only. Developers should be able to open a terminal and type in some basic lines. The instructions on the OSG website and the book are all about running stuff from the command line, its wrong to have a cavete or special documentation and rules for one platform.
And being on par isn't enough. A universally poor, but consistent user experience is not what it is about.
The current app bundle experience is appalling. Also have things consistent is crucial. The examples are just a way into learning about the OSG, its doesn't make sense to have different ways of teaching people on different platforms.
This is the Java GUI affect. It works the same on all platforms, but very few users are impressed.
The OSG is about graphics, about code, for developers not impressing end users with pretty GUI's.
This is arguing the wrong thing. Users need to learn both. They need to understand OSG, but they also need to understand the platform they develop for. When users look to the examples, they are looking at both the osg code, but also how it is put together for their platform.
There should be examples that illustrate how to use the OSG API. There should be examples that illustrate how to integrate the OSG with native GUI's and development frameworks. All examples should not try to do both. Each example should be minimal and focused on its not task, there shouldn't be anything more to it that is essential for it to illustrate its point.
When there were Visual Studio projects, Xcode projects, and Makefiles, users would not only look at the source code, but they would also try to understand how to build the applications by looking at the projects. Improperly building a project would be a disservice to the user and ultimately a poor reflection on OSG itself. Now people are going to look at our CMake system and are going to draw the wrong conclusions. At the very least, the default option needs to be for an .app bundle.
.app bundles right now are broken. They don't perform at all good enough.
User experience and first impressions are important. Users have an unconscious expectation of how a program should run on their platform. When they run the application for the first time, the experience should be positive. You want the person to say, 'Wow, OSG is great and has a good understanding of what it does and also how to make it work on my platform. They must know what they are doing. I want to use it.'. You don't want them to say, 'Gee, this really sucks. They don't understand my platform at all so they probably didn't do many other things right.' and move on to something else. It might not be true or fair, but this is how people make judgments.
Well I certainly want the developer experience to be a positive one. The vast majority of the changes to the OSG over the past 6 months have been about this. The unified build system, moving to single download single build package, introducing a new viewer library to better solve the problems that users have to tackle, the book. This week I have Martin and his Mac Pro, its a great opportunity for me to see how things are working under OSX and get things stable and working as well as under other platforms. Yesterday we got the CMake build up to useful point. Now we've got all the examples working I'm pretty pleased with how things are looking and behaving under OSX, Stephan's work on GraphicsWindowCarbon really has made things work more slickly than things have ever been under OSX which is great. Today I've tasked Martin with trying to get a Xcode build up to see how close we are to getting things ready for 2.0. There are a few examples that are crashing, and the hangs that Stephan reported, so we'll look into these. Robert. _______________________________________________ osg-users mailing list [email protected] http://openscenegraph.net/mailman/listinfo/osg-users http://www.openscenegraph.org/
