On Monday 02 August 2004 07:26 am, Guillaume Laurent wrote: > Chris Cannam wrote: > >One reason is that while you can easily establish when something is > >hard to use, everyone will disagree on what would make it easier -- > >i.e. it requires creative insight, it's not just routine work. > > It is, also, routine work, there are ways to test the usability of a UI, > except it's a *lot* of work, and requires things like sitting next to > volunteering "guinea pigs" and similar stuff. None of us has either the > skills, time or resources needed for this.
A big problem I see here too is that Rosegarden is such a niche product. We're being compared to Ink-something. Some kind of drawing program. I don't know anything about it, but I know the GIMP. How many people use the GIMP? There are a bazillion GIMP fansites. People contribute gradients and patterns and brushes and script fu out the wazoo. When it comes to the arts, the visual arts are more popular than music. Everybody draws a little or paints a little or wants to enlarge something or crop it or retouch it or whatever. I've got a pool of guinea pigs that could give good, clean, untainted impressions of Rosegarden entirely on its own terms, with no preconceptions, but they don't know diddly squat about music. They don't play, they don't compose. They can't really offer much. Being cross-platform would help a lot too. With the GIMP, again, or even Open Office.org it's not just for Linux, but an open source alternative for everyone. Porting RG to other platforms would be good for drawing interest from other corners, but there are a lot of obstacles there. Not the least of which, for my own part, is the fact that I'm not running any other platforms, and I guess I don't really care about people who are running OS-X or Windows. That gets back to Alexandre's earlier point about how it's important that we who are developing this make ourselves happy first. As an aside, if you ever start to think Rosegarden is complicated, go grab the source to Open Office.org. Gah. I counted 4,830,797 lines of code in 8089 source files. -- Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621 http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/ http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/ ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by OSTG. Have you noticed the changes on Linux.com, ITManagersJournal and NewsForge in the past few weeks? Now, one more big change to announce. We are now OSTG- Open Source Technology Group. Come see the changes on the new OSTG site. www.ostg.com _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
