usability

The cathedral plus the bazaar: Open source and Apple (design) envy

Walk the halls of any open-source conference and you'll see a large percentage of attendees with ironically un-open-source Apple laptops and iPhones. I've commented on the reasons for this before, but a new thought sprung to mind while reading Matthew Thomas' excellent (and old) "Why free software usability tends to suck."

Open-source advocates like good design as much as anyone, but the open-source development process is often not the best way to achieve it.

Thomas now works for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, which arguably offers the industry's best Linux experience for personal computers. I … Read more

Why enterprise software is so shockingly bad

For the past few years, we've talked about the "consumerization of IT," which was a polite way of saying, "Enterprise software stinks and should be made easier to use."

I've rarely seen as concise an explanation of why enterprise software is so bad as this one by Michael Nygard on his Wide Awake Developers blog.

Nygard points to a troubling intermediation between the users of software and developers of software, offering four ways in which this is expressed:

"They serve their corporate overlords, not their users." This is one of the problems … Read more

Shuttleworth: There's more to Linux development than kernel hacks

As I've noted before, there is more to open-source development than lines of code written, important though that activity is. There is, for example, the critical work done by Canonical, the company behind the ubiquitous Ubuntu Linux distribution, which tends to involve more ease-of-use development than core kernel development.

Canonical CEO and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth highlights this "secondary" development in an Ubuntu Open Week interview, reported by Ars Technica. Arguing that "Ubuntu and Canonical are making a very big difference in free software, and that has little to do with how many patches in the … Read more

Software was made for people, not people for software

I had a very frustrating experience this morning. I decided to start editing an internal team wiki and ran into a significant roadblock: To edit the wiki, I first needed to learn "wikiml." What is wikiml? I'm glad you asked. It's a wiki markup language so that wikis look more like Web pages/documents, and not like a stream of undifferentiated text.

There's just one problem: Wikiml. Who wants to learn a markup language just so you can collaborate with colleagues? It's not that the markup language is particularly difficult (here's a cheat sheet for reference), but requiring the learning of a new language is a step backward, not forward, in terms of ease of use.

Wikis may be more powerful than a Microsoft Word document, but if they're not at least as easy, then they're simply not going to get used. Period. Google gets this: Google Docs is actually easier to use than Microsoft Word.

The Bible has this great counsel in Mark 2:27:

The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.

The idea is that Biblical commandments were not designed to inhibit people, but to enable and improve them. Sometimes we let the letter of a law impede the spirit and end up cramping our capabilities. Is there a correlation to software?… Read more

Why Apple and Google are winning

I'm rereading Businessweek's excellent article, "The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit," and it became very clear why Apple is succeeding in the enterprise despite not focusing on the enterprise.

Apple has made computing pleasant.

I love my Mac. I love its look and feel. I love the software. I actually look forward to using my Mac. It's not a Dell, dude. It has class.

Another (overused) way of saying this is that Apple has "consumerized" the computing experience. As it turns out, enterprises employ consumers. Lots of them.

But it's not just Apple.… Read more

Usability, a question of (open source) leadership

At today's Open Source Business Conference Jim Zemlin, president of the Linux Foundation, said something interesting (and hope-inducing) about open-source development. The session was on what the open source world can learn from Microsoft.

Surely, there are many things to not learn from Microsoft. Usability, however, is not one of them. Say what you want about Microsoft, but it has led the industry in lowering the bar to computing for average people. When I was in law school Microsoft used to give me free software so that it could come by my house to watch how I work. Microsoft spends considerable resources in the field to determine how people use, or could use, software.… Read more

Why your grandma doesn't run desktop Linux

I see articles like this one--explaining the migration of one's mom, grandma, etc. to Linux--and I can't help but believe it's proof positive that the migration in question never should have happened. If it requires an article explaining the success (or failure) of the migration, it's too difficult to bother doing.

At least this author was honest:

So, is Ubuntu Linux ready for this type of installation? Yes, provided they have someone with some Linux expertise at hand to help them.

I'm an open-source believer, but that belief does not mean that I believe open source should be used where it is a less viable solution. At some point the desktop Linux crowd is going to realize that its goals (control, primarily) don't necessarily mesh well with those of the average user (usability, primarily). This is fine. It's not cause for alarm. … Read more

The talking dog of virtualization

I started my computing life on a Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of memory (total). If I wanted to get it to do anything of significance I had to laboriously hand code it, sometimes from a magazine that published user-submitted programs (with accompanying bug notices and typo corrections in the following month's issue). Today I work on a Mac Book Pro with dual 2 gigaherz processors and 104,857,600 times more memory (approximately). It does most things I want, including running two operating systems simultaneously.

I use Parallels on top of OS X, and let me start by saying … Read more

When Web 2.0 (Yahoo Maps) attacks

I'll start by confessing my curmudgeon-ness. I can't stand the new "broadband" Yahoo Maps interface. I find it totally clunky, hard to use, and overly graphical--the vast majority of the time I'm using a mapping site, it's to get driving directions that I plan to either print out or send to my phone, and it's usually just to double-check my GPS directions. I'm fine with simple text directions and a nice little map. So it's been fine for me to just click back to the Classic Yahoo Maps interface (since Yahoo … Read more