On 8/13/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@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.