mandaboo opened this issue on Feb 03, 2005 ยท 31 posts
Phantast posted Thu, 03 February 2005 at 10:17 AM
Basically, I agree with mandaboo. In both Vue 4 and Poser there are so many instances of shoddy programming that if one were teaching computer science one could make a good lecture on how not to design software using examples just from Vue and Poser. Many of the examples would indeed be small things, but attention to detail makes the difference between a well-designed program that is pleasant to use, and a badly designed one that thwarts the user's expectations. I'll give you another small example. Whenever you wish to change the colour of something, what do you do? You see a box showing the present colour. The obvious thing to do is to click the box. This has no effect. You have to RIGHT click the box and choose "Edit colour" from the pop-up menu. This defeats one's expectations and is more cumbersome. Agreed, the pop-up menu allows you other choices like "Copy colour". But nine times out of ten what you want to do is change the colour, and since no other function is assigned to a left click on the colour box, why not also allow a left click to access the change colour routine? The amount of coding to implement this would be trivial. A well-designed program takes the effort of simple repetitive tasks away from the user. Every time you save the user an unecessary click in common tasks speeds up the workflow. Vue 4 (and I don't know that 5 is any better) is not carefully designed, and the interface is not well thought through. Poser is even worse. The merit of both programs lies in the results you can obtain. But how much nicer they would both be if you weren't forever battling against clumsy design.