On 8/13/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not convinced of that. Designing good user
interfaces is hard. You
really think we can produce anything close to Picnik?
I'm sorry to buck the groupthink here, but I think the picnik
interface isn't impressive from a "good user interface" perspective.
It's flashy, no arguments... It's fairly easy to use, but it doesn't
do much: It supports cropping and resizing, and a couple of image
adjustments which map to a 1d slider or two.
A braindead ajax wrapper around imagemagick offering the same features
would have the same effective user interface, thought it might lack
the pretty shaded buttons and the fade in loading screen. Even the
smooth zoom in function should be fairly easy to implement if you
don't mind making the app dependant on the browser supporting SVG.
Flashyness is not, itself, evidence of a good user interface. Picnik
does have a good interface, but this is more of a product of doing
very little than any user interface brillance.