If I was Ron Hovsepian...

A long time ago, when my OS was Windows, I used a demo of a little program called Paint Shop Pro 4. Of course, I didn't have much time to RTFM, since the demo expired one month later, but I had more than enough time to make quite a few backgrounds for my desktop. As far as I can remember from 5 years ago, it worked about like this.

For a 1024 x 768 desktop. I'd draw a 3 x 4 frame of any size. That was easy since the ratio of the frame's sides was indicated in the status bar at the bottom. Then, by pressing CTRL, the pointer would turn to a hand. By grabbing the corners of the frame, you could resize it and keep the aspect ratio. By grabbing the nodes on either side, you could modify the aspect ratio. By putting the hand somewhere in the picture, you could move the frame around . So the job was quickly done and there was no need to RTFM. You just tried this and that and pretty soon, you found how things worked. And, of course, it was easy to remember.

Now, I use The GIMP. When I draw a "selection", the aspect ratio is not indicated and since no hand or nodes appear to modify the selection, I must figure out exactly what the size of one side will be, then grab a pen to calculate what the other side's size should be to get the right aspect ratio. Painful? You bet!

If you press the CTRL key to see if you can move your selection, you find out that, unfortunately, it only allows to remove something from the selection. It looks like this:

______________
| __|
| |
| |_
|_____________|

(Excuse my ascii art :)

Well, SHIFT maybe? Well, no. It does the opposite, it adds to the selection.

Well, I'm surely a weird guy. I suppose GIMP developers add and substract from selections hundred of times a day and that's why they use the most common keys to accomplish these operations they so dearly cherish and cheer, but I for one have never used them.

So, what about ALT? Sorry. It moves all the picture and title bar to another part of the screen.

ALT + SHIFT? It does the same ALT alone.

What about no key at all? It cuts the selection from the picture and moves it. (Also very useful!)

ALT + CTRL ? YES! It does move the selection! But how do you enlarge the selection? There's a way. I remember taking an hour or two searching this about six months ago. It must be somewhere in my notes, but I don't remember.

Is there a way to enlarge the selection while keeping the aspect ratio? I'm not sure. Maybe another hour or two of research would help. My time being precious, I could call a partner who could search for me at 75$ / hour. (At this hourly rate, they're never in a rush. The less they know, the more it pays!)

And it's the same all over the interface. For instance, having to sharpen a picture is a very common operation. Many amateur and not so amateur pictures are out of focus. Here's how to do it in the GIMP. You'll see how handy it is.

Right-click on the picture and select the 9th option, filters. (Isn't it clear that you need a filter to sharpen a picture?) There, the 6th non-grayed option out of 18 is Enhance. It looks like it. Then, the 5th option out of 6, is sharpen. So, you sharpen your picture. ***! It seems that, overall, you overdid it. So you take great care opening the 3 levels of menus -- what was that first option again? Image, Tools? Nope. Filters! -- and you click the right had corner of the last menu and select "Stay on top" or "Stay visible", whatever, so that you can try all the degrees of sharpness you want on your picture and maybe tenths of other ones. But every time, the 3 levels of menu collapse after you make your changes.

Now, if you RTFM, there might be a way to get away from this nightmare. The problem is, after you're through RTFM, you're divorced twice, your kids have left home, your dog is dead and you must start over because you don't remember the beginning: there's no frickin' logic in the interface!

Many Linux softwares have such a low degree of usability. The 8th most asked question at OOo, is how to save a page as the default template! Is it really normal that users search more than 30 seconds to find how to accomplish such a basic operation?

Whereas Windows developpers test and retest their interfaces with users, Linux braggarts explain that there are two kinds of Linux users: developers and ranters. If you don't code, you're not allowed to rant and if you're a developer, you're not allowed to rant, since you can change the code to suit your needs. The bragging never cease, things never change.

The GIMP could move to 24 bit color, have superb CMYK printing, be vector based all the way, it still wouldn't be a favorite. After an hour or two of this fooling around, graphic artists would still move back to Photoshop.

The main thing Linux lacks to make it on the desktop is common sense. That things can finally be done sonehow is irrelevant. What counts is how efficiently they can be done.

If I was Ron Hovsepian, there's one thing I would care about: the usability of the software I sell. In all the long interview he gave to CRN, this concern did'nt appear once.

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