why are mid sized open source projects worse than the proprietary ones?

[Exhale]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHQv4blla7g

because they are run by coders and dont have a balancing QUALIFIED design team (not your half assed approximation that you think is good enough).

[n0cturn]

Don't you just love youtube 'experts'

[Exhale]

Don't you just love youtube 'experts'

dont you just love people who flippantly disregard a valid opinion to denigrate the source? otherwise known as the ad-hominem fallacy. Try addressing the content instead of denigrating where it came from.

[n0cturn]

Maybe you should watch the video again and pay attention to which software gets the most plugs, then you will understand the motivation behind the video (or more to the point the money behind it)

Nothing is what it seems on the internet, its just seen as one big advertising opportunity

[manx]

The premise of the video appears to be that, in particular, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere have intuitive easy-to-use interfaces. It compares them only to mainly a single open source alternative respectively. It does not even mention other open source alternatives (of which there are plenty), and also completely ignores other closed source alternatives with different user interface approaches.

IMHO the premise is already wrong, which makes discussing anything else rather pointless.
I do not know whether it is actually paid advertising (feels too badly made for that), but it is certainly heavily biased towards Adobe.

[Vojvodinosaurus]

OMPT is the only tracker I use. Audacity is the audio editor I use the most. LMMS is the DAW i use the most. Inkscape is the vector graphics software I used the most. All this despite using a Windows. Just goes to show that sometimes, FOSS is all you need. Though I'm still hesitant to switch to Linux so I'll prolly use it alongside Windows.

[Exhale]

frankly the video is echoing the frustration I see from a lot of people, including myself with the obtuse programmer first, blind to welcoming design dominating the majority of open source projects. Including this one.
With the programmers fawned over none stop like fucking gods, they strut around with swelling heads and think they are so clever that they can design. Design is something people devote their whole lives to, like programming, it isnt something some fool can just pick up and sniff the air to get right.
This perception comes from the propensity for people to keep telling designers and musicians 'oh you are so talented', thinking of it as something innate in people instead of something they have had to work their asses off for.
And thus you get dumbass designs like gimp which actively get in the way of artistic creativity while using the thing. Yes I include krita and inkscape in this, and I include old blender in this.
When blender first came out I was on that thing like crazy, but its old interface was much MUCH worse than the modern thing - which I fear is only being held back from becoming another obtuse mess by the fact that it has an actual design team that is taken seriously and listened to by the programmers who might otherwise think they know better. Blender could go right back down that rabbithole if they decided to start ignoring the designers again, and frankly I dont think they are listening to the designers enough even now.

[Exhale]

We all forget it, since we are so used to the way ompt works, but it is terribly designed. For a new user it is dauntingly confusing, and always finds a new way to trip up their creative flow. It is a godaweful mess, and we need to own that, accept it, before we can begin to change it.
There are some real positives, the tab system is a strong intuitive one. But the contents of the tabs get in the way of things, presenting options that a person cant even interract with (greyed out options) to overwhelm the mind giving our present system an information overload.
I know when I first started in mpt (before I knew there was an o version, which i think was only a few years old at the time) I was forced to read the help section almost every time I used it, and these days the help isnt even an offline thing, new users have to go to the wiki.
The reason I eventually came to these forums in the first place was to learn things I was sure I could do in ompt but had no help in the help learning about such as  Zxx macros and how to take full control of vsts. I had to search the forums here just to properly learn what I was doing because I learn very slowly and always have.
The point is, what a programmer thinks is self explanatory almost never actually is. The things us wizened old users of a bit of software think are logical pretty much never are. And to see that difference and fight to bridge that gap is the power of carefully thought out design... which is what is lacking in the majority of open source projects out there, including this one.

[manx]

Do you have anything tangible to propose here, or is this just you rambling around?


There is no razor-sharp distinction between user interface design and programming as you might make it sound. OpenMPT is a very old code base, and a lot of ancient (and arguably bad) user interface design decisions cannot "just be changed" at the blink of an eye, but are baked in deeply into the code structure. At places this requires a lot of programming work (we are talking months here) to even be changeable at all. We are fully aware that there are areas where the user interface can be improved, but it is always a tradeoff between that, and working on other aspects of OpenMPT/libopenmpt (or even other projects). We do not have infinite time.
And frankly, exactly this trap of baked-in interface design decisions can arguably be seen rather well in Photoshop and Premiere, IMHO. They also keep ancient decisions, even if they are objectively bad under some criteria.

In the past ~12 years that I have been working on OpenMPT and libopenmpt, we were only once approached by a designer (and a graphics designer at that, not a user interface designer), who did re-design the OpenMPT logo. As far as I can tell, we neither alienated them, nor any other designers, as you make it sound.

"Just add a huge team of user interface designers" does not "just work". We cannot just conjure them out of thin air; and we also cannot buy them.

[Exhale]

Maybe you should watch the video again and pay attention to which software gets the most plugs, then you will understand the motivation behind the video (or more to the point the money behind it)

Nothing is what it seems on the internet, its just seen as one big advertising opportunity

as for this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO-fDAnRcNE
carefully thought out emphasis on design WORKS for larger projects across the board. As I said before, if you are always questioning the source you become blind to the message.

(yes it is a long video, but pretty much any 5 minutes of it will tell you outright that the reason zorin OS is succeeding is because they are constantly obsessed with the first user experience)

[Exhale]

Do you have anything tangible to propose here, or is this just you rambling around?


There is no razor-sharp distinction between user interface design and programming as you might make it sound. OpenMPT is a very old code base, and a lot of ancient (and arguably bad) user interface design decisions cannot "just be changed" at the blink of an eye, but are baked in deeply into the code structure. At places this requires a lot of programming work (we are talking months here) to even be changeable at all. We are fully aware that there are areas where the user interface can be improved, but it is always a tradeoff between that, and working on other aspects of OpenMPT/libopenmpt (or even other projects). We do not have infinite time.
And frankly, exactly this trap of baked-in interface design decisions can arguably be seen rather well in Photoshop and Premiere, IMHO. They also keep ancient decisions, even if they are objectively bad under some criteria.

In the past ~12 years that I have been working on OpenMPT and libopenmpt, we were only once approached by a designer (and a graphics designer at that, not a user interface designer), who did re-design the OpenMPT logo. As far as I can tell, we neither alienated them, nor any other designers, as you make it sound.

"Just add a huge team of user interface designers" does not "just work". We cannot just conjure them out of thin air; and we also cannot buy them.

I am saying OMPT needs a design team, every project needs one. And the purely design focused team needs to be listened to very carefully. Preferably qualified designers.

oh and just because you decree their is no "razor sharp distinction" doesnt make it so.
Yes some programmers dip their feet into design, yes, some designers dip their feet into programming. I dipped a toe myself. But I am still a distinctly design minded person and I could only go so far in programming before my eyes began to glaze over and I no longer understood. From the other side the problem is worse because you can THINK you understand a design concept without actually having any idea what you are talking about.
The dunning kruger is strong when it comes to programmers who think they can fucking design.
Yes... I am on a rant here.
Yes... I have bloody good reasons to be - connected to this project specifically and in plenty of other world interactions.
and YES I am being blunt and giving this project the bloody medicine it needs to ingest eventually. If not today, tomorrow, or long after I am dead, then one day I can only hope that OMPT wakes up to what it is doing to its users from the design side.

The overlap is that the designers and programmers have to work closely together... the moment the programmers expect the designers to become programmers, or think they can do the design work themselves you get the problem the majority of open source programs have, the one ompt sits in too.

[manx]

I guess you should reconsider your assessment of our qualification. You frankly do not know our education and background, so please stop assuming things and accusing us of random things. You are not constructive AT ALL here.

You are saying OpenMPT needs a "design team" (quite a claim for a currently 2 person project), yet you provide no suggestion at all on how to get one. And you also offer no alternative. What's your point, really? We already know that the OpenMPT user interface can be improved in various aspect. Rambling around and reiterating that fact is not exactly helpful.

[Exhale]

I guess you should reconsider your assessment of our qualification. You frankly do not know our education and background, so please stop assuming things and accusing us of random things. You are not constructive AT ALL here.

You are saying OpenMPT needs a "design team" (quite a claim for a currently 2 person project), yet you provide no suggestion at all on how to get one. And you also offer no alternative. What's your point, really? We already know that the OpenMPT user interface can be improved in various aspect. Rambling around and reiterating that fact is not exactly helpful.

I was here offering my design services and being shot down... yes I was just one designer and frankly being shat on for the general UI improvements pretty much entirely focused on ease of use has made me fuck right off. 2 volunteer designers who love the software for what it does but have clear ideas of where it could go is all that would be needed to steer the design language of this project.
And frankly your qualifications towards design are irrelevant.
Your focus is programming, and has been for long enough to take your focus away from art. That is the reality of the homage jack of all traits and master of none... the more you divide your time among other focuses the less qualified you are for the ones you have.
I have music and art, I take my inspirations for those from all around me, games, movies, television, etc - the inspirations for these things are conveniently clustered... both are pure creation and aesthetics. You have at least programming on top of that which depending on the languages you have delved into could be infinitely massive with rabbit holes of information. And that is not counting the real life stuff we both do - all of which steer our minds away from our capacity with our primary qualifications.
Scientifically none of us can multitask - this is fact. It is always divided attention.
So dont even pretend that spending an afternoon, a month, a year, even a decade playing around in graphic software can make you compare to a graphic designer who has devoted his / her entire life and career to it.

EDIT :
So yes, all our attention is divided, thus it is entirely about obsession. It stands to reason that any designer volunteering time to help with this project will have at least a divided attention between music making and designing. The focus and obsession in OMPT is obviously functionality, and that is great, but it needs some people to join the team who are listened to and not brushed off who are obsessed with and focus almost exclusively on the design and user experience - which would take some severe restructuring of how things on this collection of websites, specifically the issue tracker.

Your opinion on the usefulness of my criticisms here are also irrelevant. These are things that need to be said, over and over again, because the message is never received and crucially acted upon.

[n0cturn]

I think your communication skills need a little work. Being confrontational NEVER gets the results you want.

[manx]

I was here offering my design services and being shot down... yes I was just one designer and frankly being shat on for the general UI improvements pretty much entirely focused on ease of use has made me fuck right off.

Can you provide an example link?

And frankly your qualifications towards design are irrelevant.

Why? Why is yours or anyone elses not? This makes no sense.

Your focus is programming, and has been for long enough to take your focus away from art.

Wrong. Do not make assumptions about me.
Also, I would really not consider user interface design an art at all. It's more engineering and craftsmanship. I agree that graphics design is art, but that is really not what is lacking in OpenMPT, IMHO.

I have music and art, I take my inspirations for those from all around me, games, movies, television, etc - the inspirations for these things are conveniently clustered... both are pure creation and aesthetics. You have at least programming on top of that which depending on the languages you have delved into could be infinitely massive with rabbit holes of information.

Similarly you supposedly have design on top of that. There is a really big difference between experiencing design and being able to create design. The latter is also "on top" of the former.

So dont even pretend that spending an afternoon, a month, a year, even a decade playing around in graphic software can make you compare to a graphic designer who has devoted his / her entire life and career to it.

Again, you are making assumptions about me which are outright wrong. Just stop doing that, it really does not support your argument at all.

Also, to make things absolutely clear here: I was never talking about graphic design at all here. This is not something that OpenMPT needs, frankly at all. There are 3.5 distinct assets that even require it at all in OpenMPT: Application Icon, File Icon, Project Logo, and maybe the styling of the pattern view (however, see https://bugs.openmpt.org/view.php?id=1114 - that code is an utter mess of spaghetti code at the moment).
What OpenMPT likely needs is user interface design. However, given the UI toolkit that OpenMPT currently uses (MFC), and the way user interface code is still deeply interlocked with logic code in our code base, a user interface designer alone will never be able to do any user interface design work on OpenMPT in its current form. It would require at least an additional dedicated user interface programmer to even be able to implement any user interface changes at all. Decoupling the application logic from user interface code is something that I have been working on constantly since starting working on OpenMPT - because it is a necessary precondition to even be able to attack some user interface problems in the first place - because I always knew it was necessary - and it's a very slow process.

It stands to reason that any designer volunteering time to help with this project will have at least a divided attention between music making and designing. The focus and obsession in OMPT is obviously functionality, and that is great, but it needs some people to join the team who are listened to and not brushed off who are obsessed with and focus almost exclusively on the design and user experience

As just explained, purely focusing on design will not be able to work with the current OpenMPT code base. It will inevitably require the existing programmers to devote time to implement such changes, in a code base where this takes more time than it would take in a cleaner code base. The code base needs to get cleaned up further nonetheless anyway though. So, implementing big user interface design changes NOW, results in double the work. Given how small the OpenMPT project is, investing double the time is not something that makes all too much sense, IMHO. The current user interface design and code is somewhat of a dead end, and we have been knowing that for years (see https://bugs.openmpt.org/view.php?id=783 and related issues for discussion of some aspects of that). Investing significant amounts of time into the current interface to improve it would stall other development in OpenMPT and libopenmpt, and probably also burn out people who have to implement the changes. That is maybe something a pure design-only person will have difficulties to understand, but that is frankly just the situation of the current user interface code.

which would take some severe restructuring of how things on this collection of websites, specifically the issue tracker.

We have been bitten by big hosters failing more than once in the past, which significantly slowed down development for a couple of weeks, which is why we probably will continue to host our own services. Changing that, even if only migrating to the big ones, would require a lot of administrative work for migrating existing information.

Your opinion on the usefulness of my criticisms here are also irrelevant. These are things that need to be said, over and over again, because the message is never received and crucially acted upon.

My opinion is kind of important because I am 1 of the 2 maintainers of OpenMPT and libopenmpt. If you cannot convince me and keep repeating wrong statements, you are wasting our time, and thereby actively hurting the project.
Please at least try to be constructive.