On 8/14/07, Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@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