Subject:
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Re: Am I the only person who finds Lego CAD systems infuriating?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Fri, 2 Sep 2005 01:13:29 GMT
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Viewed:
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659 times
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In lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto, Timothy Gould wrote:
> However the weighting for each of these points is different for different
> software aims. In the case of a CAD system, Efficiency and Memorability are
> probably the most important aspects in the long run. You obviously consider
> learnability to be of higher importance but IF it comes at the expense of
> others, I would say that increasing learnability would detract from the software
> as a whole.
I don't want to speak for anyone else, but I would have to ask the question if
efficiency and memorability were that important for this CAD system. If you're
building the next Airbus 380 or industrial automation, then sure, speed for the
operator/drafting technician is important. But this is Lego :) I suspect a lot
of users might just want to put some bricks together for fun. And that
learnability isn't there...then you lose a great deal of the user base.
I could see, and I don't know this for sure:
a) People who want to build the occassional Lego CAD model for say a website or
to explain something.
b) People who build all day in Lego CAD (eg, James Mathis)
The a) users aren't being helped here. The b) users have stuck with it so far.
> With that I completely agree. Unfortunately the people that have expertise in
> this field rarely seem to want to contribute to FOSS projects, quite possible
> because the culture doesn't encourage it.
Well, that's an interesting point: With programming, you can sit alone in your
dorm room or wherever hacking out a piece of code. But things like
documentation, usability, and analysis aren't the kind of things people can do
alone or for free.
Say you managed to get some UCD types to work on X. It's not like you can sit
and bang out "here's five things I want to fix". You need to find thirty new or
typical users, figure out their scenarios or use cases, then get them in and
watch them use the system. Then you need to review, analyze and produce a
document with recommendations. Which probably will be ridiculed by all the
developers anyways, because...
To use ESR's (ugh, I won't want to lend credence to him) terms, the scratchers
don't have the itch to fix the design problems (because they're not users), and
the itchy (new users) don't have the ability to scratch.
I think if you look at FOSS development, it's always been one of a few things:
-Some developer or systems utility (eg, OS, webserver, scripting language)
-Emulation of some successful product (eg, GIMP, OpenOffice)
The former, the scratcher is the itcher. The latter, you don't need to do any
design work on, because the template is already there. Half the time with the
latter, the motivation us geek-political anyways (eg, we hate Microsoft, down
with Microsoft, let's make our own mediocre, more bug ridden version, so at
least we can say we're Microsoft-free).
Calum
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