Blender Is GPL 385
BartV writes with a low-key snippet from the new blender.org: ""Today, Sunday oct 13, 2002, we've launched the Blender sources as GNU GPL to the Internet. Blender has become Free Software forever!" This should be a case study for other companies with software no longer profitable as payware; read some of our previous postings about Blender to follow the story from idea to release.
Re:UI. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem about changing blender's ui is that its thousands of users love it and want to keep it because it's very practical and very well done. That is if you have a keyboard.
First time I used blender I couldnt even create one shape. than dumped it. than whine. Than I read one of the numerous tutorials.
Than I understood the beauty of it. Basically, with blender you have a 100 keys mouse. One hand on the mouse, the other on the keyboard and there you go. People who can play fps can use blender.
The magic key is the space bar.
I found studio max interface easy at first contact THAN difficult to cope with. Blender's is the opposite. Yet, now that it's gpl, you can have a new one designed anyway.
FYI... (Score:2, Insightful)
Just so you know, any GUI that needs people to "get used to it" is bad design and doesn't take into consideration human factors and usability.
Re:FYI... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:FYI... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not if it lets people who KNOW HOW TO USE IT do what they need in a signifantly more efficient manner. As far as I care, all GUI's should be more difficult to use, people are too stupid as it is.
Re:FYI... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have been designed with only one goal in mind. Workflow speed.
Its better to design the ui of an app you use all day to be as fast as possible and then not to care about the learning curve.
This is becouse the time it takes you to learn the app is made up for in a matter of days when you actually use the app.
You cannot claim that people must understand the app when its about 3d software. This is becouse they are in themselfs very hard apps to use. So the people using them havto be very tech friendly. They should not have any problem learning the ui nomatter how hard it is.
The people that complain about the ui eather havent spent enough time learning it or quite simply doesnt have any buisness learning it in the first place.
If you are just using a 3d app to play with and create some cool graphics you might aswell use poser or bryce.
Blender is a tool designed for fast workflow, to be used in a team environment within a company.
Re:FYI... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:FYI... (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you run complex real systems without any training? Could you drive a car intuitively? Play a saxophone intuitively?
Everything else in the world requires patience, practice and knowledge to operate. Why is it that people think extremely complex machines (computers) should/can be easy enough for any retard to use?
That being said I still hate the blender GUI. I tried in earnest for 3 or 4 hours to use it, didnt make any headway and said "Fuck this, im going back to rhino"
Re:FYI... (Score:5, Insightful)
Huh? It's fast, it's efficient and it's easy on your fingers. How is that a bad thing? Just because you don't like it doesn't mean everyone has to agree.
"Steep learning curve" does not make the UI fast. It makes it slow.
It means the interface takes some time to learn. Of course, if you haven't learned it yet and have to check the docs everytime you want to do something it will be slow. If you use the program often enough that you don't forget everything between every usage, spending some time to learn the interface properly is a great investment.
If you only edit text files once or twice a week, MS notepad is all you need. If you spend hours every day editing text, you'll want something more powerful and won't mind spending some time to use it properly. Of course, it would be great if the interface was "intuitive" enough so you wouldn't need to learn it. But as we all know, the only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it's all learned.
So, vi and Blender suck for the casual user but are perfect for anyone who uses them a lot.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can someone explain to the unwise... (Score:4, Insightful)
Blender is an absolutely frosty 3D modeling/animation/rendering package.
Okay, that's about as much I can describe with words, and I'm not a poet so I can't describe it that way, either. It is slightly puzzling on the surface, but surprisingly amazing when you look at the renderings it spews out, and the time spent doing the picture.
I've been using Blender since 1.5 or something (can't remember) and it's become one of my Graphics Packages of Choice. (Linux may be slightly behind Windows on audio and video side, but on graphics side, The GIMP, ImageMagick and Blender clearly prove it isn't behind on that area. =)
Why oh why are you such a snob? (Score:3, Insightful)
What makes you so sure that MySQL was the source of the problem? You know I have seen error messages from "real" databases before, Oracle, DB2, etc. The problem could be from bad programming, hardware failure, network loss, etc.
Thank you donators (Score:4, Insightful)
Except its bullshit... (Score:1, Insightful)
BL is BS! (Score:2, Insightful)
From the License:
For teams that don't want to operate under the GPL, we're also offering
this "non-GPL" Blender License option. This means that you can download
the latest sources and tools via FTP or CVS from our site and sign an
additional agreement with the Blender Foundation, so you can keep your
source modifications confidential. Contact the Blender Foundation via
email at license@blender.org so we can discuss how we handle the
practical matters
Re:FYI... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because there are combinations that involve the middle one.
For example, if you have a middle button (MMB), then the command may be Shift+MMB. Translated through the translation you get:
Shift+Alt+LMB
Two meta-keys at the same time is BAD DESIGN, except for something rare, like rebooting (well, it should be rare in a decent OS).
No, it isn't. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it does rule. The open-source world doesn't really have had any good 3D modeler (and only a handful of even remotely tolerable renderers - no, PoV-Ray isn't open source, yet).
(And, people who say it's not intuitive and the interface sucks just don't get it. Trust me, it is a wonderful program to work with once you get hang of it. =)
(Okay, this paragraph is probably going out of hand, but within realms of argument...) What do you get if you buy something that's compatible with some obscure, undocumented Windows software? Uh, a server that is tailored to work together nicely with some proprietary API that was never meant to see the light of the day. This, as opposed to funding development of some standard server. Why pay for Exchange compatible calendar/mail server? Why not pay for development of vCalendar / SMTP server? Why not tell your boss that using a standard server would probably mean higher security and increased reliability? </offtopic>
Of course, the same argument could be said of Blender: it only took some open formats as input, processed a proprietary format, and spewed out a (somewhere) standardized file in one form or other. But it could also be argued that there are still not that good standards on this field (swapping a model file from one modeler to another is always a nice way to spend a weekend), and that Blender does support a few of currently known "open" formats (or at least provide some way of converting).
Re:FYI... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:UI. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:FYI... (Score:2, Insightful)
As for Blender, I tried it and gave up as well. I think some software has so many features that it becomes difficult to give intuitive ways to quickly perform all appropriate actions.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why??? --Why don't you leave? (Score:1, Insightful)
Go right the fuck ahead. Fire it up. Ask around. Raise some money.
Do you think these people who got Blender GPL'd would take their money back to give to some exchange client? I think not.
People put their money where they want to see development. Blender is far more exciting software than what you speak of to most of the people here.
The people bitching about blender are probably those that have nothing better to do than bitch most of the time; probably much like yourself.
Re:FYI... (Score:3, Insightful)
I've not got this version of Blender up and running yet so I'm not making a specific comment. However, as we've got onto generalities: newbies don't support and improve projects, they suck support-time from those who could be improving software.
Re:Music Notation vs Intuative (Score:4, Insightful)
- Classical music alternates frequently between very long notes (sometimes held across eight or nine measures) and very quick notes (sixteenths very frequently, occasionally thirty-seconds or faster). Representing both of those notes in a human-readable form, without changing your scale every measure and thereby negating the whole point, would be very difficult. If you try to avoid that by defining the standard measure width by the most cramped measure, you're still in trouble because you'll end up with such long measures that you cannot easily guage the distance of your notes and therefore also negate the value of the system. In other words, you'll have to add other notations to your staff until you negate the benefit which you are proposing.
- Your solution works great for computer, but I want you to try to tell musicians who notate pieces (which would be any professional musician anywhere and any half-decent music student as well) that they should bring a ruler to practice to ensure their notes are the proper width. There is a major value to our current system, which is I can do it with an unsteady hand and a pencil on sheet music propped in front of me at 45 degrees. With your system I'd have to lay it flat, take out a ruler, figure out how wide the measures were, divide that width by the width of the note I wanted to draw, line that note up with the end of the previous note, and then draw the right length. I fail to see this catching on.
There are other problems with your system too--for example, what happened to rests?--but quite frankly I think the above two complaints are sufficient enough.Tool A, Tool B... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why should an expert tool be harder to use? That is simply a poor excuse for designers who could not make 100, or 1000+ options easy to use and access. If they changed their interface from an option-select to a defered-create and make icon graphics consistent, a design change such as that and nothing else can make a hard-to-use piece of software easy to use. I've seen that happen coutless times before on all sorts of software, from admin screens to portal interfaces.
Remember, hard-to-use software is poorly designed software. "The space shuttle is hard to fly, but the software is great! " you might think. But there we are talking extremes on the bell curve, buddy. From MS Paint to photoshot to Maya, we have keyboards, mice, screens, and stylii input. We're not landing shuttles here.
Again, having had the pleasure of making a sweet living as a UI designer, and having fun behind of both the one-way-mirrors of focus room usability tests and behind the keyboard coding, I will repeat my mantra again, at the risk of being called Troll -1...
Within the real of a PC you can put in your office (exluding space shuttle and particle accelerator stuff, ok?) hard to use software is poorly designed software.
Regards!
Re:Music Notation vs Intuative (Score:2, Insightful)
So, you're advocating something akin to guitar tab which displays the lengths of notes. (Disclaimer: I play classical guitar as a hobby and have zero tolerance for tab.)
Tell me this: with tab, how can you tell, just by looking at the score, in which key the piece is played? If your primary purpose in reading music is to reproduce the sounds a composer wrote down, then tab (or your variation of tab) may suffice, but it does not suffice for conveying music. It certainly won't help if you want to try to improvise off the score. It won't help if you want to try to analyze the music, to find patterns, to figure out a composer's "style", etc. How can you tell, by looking at tab, that a composer has moved from one key to another but is still developing the same motif in the new key?
Tab (and variations of it) have been around may years (perhaps even longer than standard notation - this would require some research, but I recall that music for the first string instruments was written using some sort of tab). The reason it's been supplanted by standard musical notation is because standard score is better. It's taken a long time to develop standard notation and it may be difficult for beginners because it's meant to convey a lot of other things which aren't too important when you're trying to figure out how to tap out greensleeves on a keyboard. Learning to read score does, unfortunately, take time, but so does learning music.
I also use vi and would leave any job that required me to code in that hyped-up notepad variant which is called Visual Studio (leave the home row to use the ARROW KEYS!?). I have no idea about any of this 3-D stuff (I understand the math, but that's about it), but I trust that the professionals in the domain have quite different needs than the amateurs.
Last time I said this it started a huuuge flamewar.
As well it should :)
Re:Blender would be better accepted with a better (Score:1, Insightful)
Blender has a pretty easy GUI compared to some of the other ones out there. Once you get the basics down its very easy. It *is* a one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse kinda deal, but its just as complicated as say...maya.
I too was once in a position of confusion... But then I went out to my local library and actually got a book on blender. The first chapter gave me a boost and I figuered out the rest on my own. Try it.
Re:Tool A, Tool B... (Score:4, Insightful)