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Posts: 1,986 | Thanked: 7,698 times | Joined on Dec 2010 @ Dayton, Ohio
#74
Originally Posted by vitaminj View Post
Firstly, unlike backend/system/OS/desktop components where lots of people can write little bits and bring them together to form a whole, you have to consider the whole UI from the start and create a consistent interaction model and look and feel, probably with some visionary type figure wearing a nice scarf who is leading a small team of trendy designers and UX people.
Uh-huh. You want a "trendy" UI. You want a "consistent" UI. Those things are better provided, in my opinion, from closed-source entities (where you will find the visionary types wearing the nice scarves). And those things are already quite well provided by Apple and Google today.

I don't personally see the need for a gorgeous, massive UI aimed towards lowest-common-denominator users. You might be able to make money that way; but I don't think you'll be perfectly serving any specific users that way.

Target the UI specifically towards the needs of the folks who are building the UI! At least that way, it'll have a chance to become self-sustaining...

Secondly, the UI is where all the components come together. If you're making something that uses components A, B & C and when you use them all together there's some funny race condition or you don't quite have all the right APIs to make it all work together in the way that was envisaged, you're the one doing the sometimes thankless task of delving into all the bits and seeing what's broken where and how you can fix it.
Again, who cares about making this thing usable for the average cellphone user? If there's no reward in fixing a particular problem in an open-source program, then congratulations, you've just discovered that your problem isn't sufficiently important. Sorry that you've got a corner case that nobody cares about, but unless you can fix it yourself or pay someone to do it, it's beyond the scope of the project.

Yes it's probably easy to lash together some kind of UI which allows you to "use" various features you'd expect from a mobile. It's very hard to make a "product" which isn't a complete inconsistent mess full of weird edge-cases that might be somewhere approaching usable as a daily driver or sell-able as a product.
If a mobile OS would be sell-able as a product just because it is consistent and usable as a daily driver, Jolla would be raking in the dollars right now. Sorry to say this, but iOS and Android are already "good enough" in that department.

So yeah, if you want an alternative to iOS and Android, then you probably don't see consistency and user experience as the most important features in an OS (or, at least, you're much more interested in some other aspect). As such, I say it would be fine to have a UI that (at least to begin with) is incomplete, inconsistent, and glitchy. A minimalist UI that gets you off the ground and lets you use mobile hardware would be a great start...

And as we've been discussing here, until you have something "nice" that people enjoy using, you're very unlikely to reach that critical mass where some of your users are developers too and they see value in jumping on board and adding stuff (in fitting with the OS design language too)
I dunno. Everyone on this board seems to have conflicting views about what is "nice" to use. Personally, I'm not a big fan of graphical UIs to begin with; the more minimalist the interface, the better I like it.

I don't really see why a UI has to have one single way of doing things, either. Apple, Google, and Jolla all try to limit their mobile UIs to do things in one particular way, and thus constrain both users and app writers into following their particular system. Perhaps this helps the ordinary user avoid having to learn lots of different mechanisms for accessing data; but it also makes the device very inflexible.

Instead, better to focus on providing a minimal set of functionality, and then allow the user to choose how they want to access that functionality, be it by swiping, pressing buttons, pulling down menus, or whatever else they would prefer. Don't bother creating a massive, full-featured UI; just give me the parts I need, and let me put it together myself.
 

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