But it could still be better [LWN.net]

But it could still be better

Posted May 11, 2004 23:31 UTC (Tue) by bryn (guest, #1482)
In reply to: The Grumpy Editor's diagram editor followup by alspnost
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's diagram editor followup

I am wary of getting critical of LWN, since the crew do such a good job and I wouldn't want them to stop. However, I still think there is some room for improvement. In this case I would be very pleased to see that the Editor has communicated with the developers of a package to make sure he has the full story. One of the great things about Free Software is that developers are quite easy to contact, so undocumented/hidden/upcoming features could also be reported on with a little extra checking.

I dunno Jon, maybe you already do this, but given some of the feedback I see here there still seems to be scope for something more.

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not really

Posted May 13, 2004 2:41 UTC (Thu) by vblum (guest, #1151) [Link]

Actually, it is highly instructive to hear how a tool will work _before_ you actually know all
the workarounds because you spoke to the High Master of Said Tool Himself. There are a
million workarounds in the world, but the key to a usable program is to get a specific job
done within reasonable amounts of time.

For instance, one of the previous posters' comments on screenshots to convert images -
that will work once, but if I had to do that every single time that I convert an image, I would
go nuts. Fortunately, there is convert out there, and the relevant information is actually
accessible in the man page, hear hear.

Not that _that_ was so easy to find out, though - from display's menus alone, I had no idea
how quick the access to standard features was in convert, and spent a lot of fruitless time
trying to wrestle gs ...

LWN Modality

Posted May 13, 2004 17:32 UTC (Thu) by JLCdjinn (guest, #1905) [Link]

Yeah, we definitely get different kinds of news from LWN, and these different types serve different and (in my estimation) still valuable purposes. On one hand we have "The Grumpy Editor" series, which does try to do an on-the-surface evaluation of many tools in parallel. This is very useful for users of a given feature set who want an initial impression of the various tools in the field.

On the other hand we have "Jon Corbet, Investigative Reporter", particularly with respect to the Kernel section. I think LWN does an excellent job of balancing its energies into news of interest to its readers. It would be a great deal of work to do an in-depth evaluation of these tools. A user-focused overview is news; an in-depth tool feature discussion is a HOWTO or other tool documentation, unless it concerns something new or of particular critical interest to the community.

But it could still be better

Posted May 15, 2004 16:41 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

I totally disagree. For desktop-oriented software like this, reasonably experienced users should be able to immediately use a program to do basic tasks. If they have to resort to reading the manual or asking the mailing list to get even simple tasks done, the program has failed.

There are always exceptions, but drawing programs are not one of them. :)