My favorite Calibre thing was when the creator was interviewed and asked about the common complaint that Calibre is ugly and he was basically like “actually it’s not.”
I’d say what he actually did was deflect the question and refuse to acknowledge that it was about appearance at all. He just talked about function over form, and that it works well and is intuitive.
I actually agree with that, I like the big buttons, and context menus usually have whatever I’m looking for, but you can take the deflection as an admission he knows it’s ugly and doesn’t think it’s even important enough to directly address.
I mean honestly just a beauty pass that softened the colour palette and gave it a less harsh appearance overall would make a big difference. He could even just create a skinning system, that’s one way that this has been addressed in the past, and it’s a job an engineer should be able to do just fine.
First off, I didn’t know the guy’s name is “Kovid”. It must have been a very weird five years for him.
Second, this is an amazing piece of text and I will show it to people to explain why having engineers make design decisions is often a terrible idea.
I genuinely believe there is a strong correlation between FOSS projects getting structured and well funded enough to hire designers and their chance of taking over as the default choice against commercial projects. If UX designers were as interested in volunteer work as engineers the software landscape would be completely different.
My favorite Calibre thing was when the creator was interviewed and asked about the common complaint that Calibre is ugly and he was basically like “actually it’s not.”
I’d say what he actually did was deflect the question and refuse to acknowledge that it was about appearance at all. He just talked about function over form, and that it works well and is intuitive.
I actually agree with that, I like the big buttons, and context menus usually have whatever I’m looking for, but you can take the deflection as an admission he knows it’s ugly and doesn’t think it’s even important enough to directly address.
I mean honestly just a beauty pass that softened the colour palette and gave it a less harsh appearance overall would make a big difference. He could even just create a skinning system, that’s one way that this has been addressed in the past, and it’s a job an engineer should be able to do just fine.
First off, I didn’t know the guy’s name is “Kovid”. It must have been a very weird five years for him.
Second, this is an amazing piece of text and I will show it to people to explain why having engineers make design decisions is often a terrible idea.
I genuinely believe there is a strong correlation between FOSS projects getting structured and well funded enough to hire designers and their chance of taking over as the default choice against commercial projects. If UX designers were as interested in volunteer work as engineers the software landscape would be completely different.