On 8/14/07, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm sorry to buck the groupthink here, but I think
the picnik
interface isn't impressive from a "good user interface" perspective.
What would be better?
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.
Crop, rotate, resize, exposure, colour balance, sharpen, red eye,
soften - what's missing that would be useful to us? Noise reduction
maybe. What else?
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.
Sure. Is anyone going to implement this?
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.
It does something we need, and it does it well. That's good enough for me.
Steve