Microsoft Reaches Out To Blender

dmbasso writes "Continuing its strategy to support FOSS application on the Windows platform, Microsoft mailed the Blender developers asking how they could help improve the experience of Blender users on Windows. Groklaw puts it in perspective using Steve Ballmer's own words."

Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows?

[neokushan]

I meant the source to windows.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Prolly because you only have been "toying" you don't understand the difference. Blender is worse than 3dsmax, which is quite a feat given that 3dsmax is a fucking piece of shit of interface compared to Maya or Lightwave.

Enough of that blender bullshit hiding behind the complexity of any 3d packages. Yes, 3D is something inherently complex. Doesn't mean that blender isn't doing it much worse than the competition. Switching between Maya, Lightwave or Cinema 4d is much easier than touching the nightmare that is Blender.

Like They Never Did with SoftImage

[wandazulu]

They should have done something similar with SoftImage for the time they actually *owned* the company. SoftImage on Windows was a terrible, horrible experience, they clearly simply got it compiled onto Windows and that was it.

I was at an animation shop for awhile where we had both the Windows and SGI version of 3.7 and the Windows version *ran* faster, but crashed a whole lot more. Finally the two guys begged for anything, even Indys, to get their work done.

Finally they sold SoftImage to, was it Avid? I can't remember now. It was clear to us, anyway, that Microsoft simply wanted to show that NT could compete with SGI in heavy-duty graphics work, but they did a terrible, terrible job of it.

That said, both Max and Maya work pretty well (I know, Max was always a Windows-only product), but neither were ever owned by the company who actually wrote the OS.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[warlorddagaz]

I have also been learning to use blender recently, and would agree with you on the efficiency front, but not on the intuitive one - it took me ages to find a decent tutorial (I eventually used the noob to pro wikibook), and without one I was stumped. The problems with the interface for beginners is that not much is apparent - for example, I could create a cube/cylinder/monkey, and with a bit of fiddling managed to make it red and clear, I could sometimes move random nodes. But this was essentially it. The problem comes due to the heavy reliance upon keyboard shortcuts and unnamed icons, which once learned are certainly efficient and easy to use, but they don't facilitate easy learning.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, you know what. I doubt there is any convincing you because like so many other people, you've already made up your mind based on what you've heard.

The poster you're replying to states 1) he or she has used a wide variety of 3d applications over the past 20 years, and 2) spent effort trying to learn Blender and found it to be lacking in comparison with those other 3d applications. In response you accuse them of already making up their mind based on what they "heard." Did you just not read their reply?

Re:Don't Read The Article

[fuego451]

how about we hear something from blender

Will this do [blender.org]?

I would not touch that with a barge pole. MS XML is an example that they are not moving on that issue, or they would support ODF, not using dirty tactics to force an half-backed non open standard.

They have an history to use one OSS group against another too.

Blender is in a position where we do not depend on any MS backed format, so I think we should be very careful to stay neutral in those areas.

and

Personally I don't see why specific attention should be given to proprietary Microsoft file formats. If they continue to avoid truly open standards and their own file formats provide a sub-optimal experience for Windows users, then it is not the open source community that has a problem imho.

I don't see Microsoft making it easy for Mac, Sun, Linux etc users to use their "file formats, which are not open or not fully open". Any multi platform application which has support for Windows specific file formats is going to end up with a fragmented community as data then becomes platform specific even if the application isn't.

Do we want to help Microsoft lock more users data to their platform, or do we want to encourage Microsoft to truly move towards open standards?

That's just the first two comments.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[maxwell demon]

However the discussion in this thread is about the use of the word "intuitive", which doesn't mean "easy to use". It doesn't even mean "easy to learn" (if an application uses "foo" to mean "yes" and "bar" to mean "no" on its buttons, that's relatively easy to learn, and certainly as easy to use as "yes"/"no", but it's by no means intuitive). An intuitive interface means you can correctly guess most common operations without consulting the manual or online help.

Re:It's a trap!

[geminidomino]

I think you're mixing movie quotes.

"It's a trap!" -- Princess Leia/Admiral Ackbar

"It's a trick. Get an axe." -- Ash

Re:They don't really need Microsoft

[LetterRip]

Actually.. Microsoft doesn't do anything that nearly competes with Blender. The should just add support for OpenNURBS (which is already free anyways).

MS just purchased Caligari which makes Truespace, a (low end) competitor in the 3D market. So they do in fact compete with us directly.

LetterRip

Re:Irony, much?

[codemachine]

OOXML is definitely better than the old blobs. But it should've never become an ISO standard either. Only massive corruption allowed that to happen.

With Blender, as long as those MS file import/export filters work on all platforms that Blender does, sure, go ahead and add support for these file formats. But if the filters use some library only available on a Windows system, then Blender ends up with functionality that only works on the Windows platform. This is great for MS, but maybe not so good for the entire Blender project.

As someone on the mailing list pointed out, the original email from MS is pretty vague as to what they're looking to help with. There would need to be more discussion before the Blender folks could figure out whether this offer to help is something they want to pursue. Hopefully the help isn't turned down before that part happens. Better to look at the technical merits and other factors involved first, instead of just making assumptions it is a bad idea because it involves Microsoft.

There is good reason to be suspicious, but dismissing them outright before knowing the details just widens the gulf between FOSS and MS, and gives them little incentive to even try working with the community.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[gwait]

Download Google Sketchup, and you can pick up its basic 3D modelling in an hour. It's by far the easiest 3D modeller I've ever played around with.

Same old deva ju

[AnalogDiehard]

M$ "reached out" to JAVA developers way back when, look how well that turned out.

It's a trap

[stox]

Microsoft seems to be doing a lot of talking about open source these days, but outside of what they have been required to do by law, their efforts have a hollow ring to them. They don't really want to support open source, what they do want is to bring the productivity of open source products to the windows platform only.

Don't punish people who use Blender on Windows...

[NimbleSquirrel]

MS want to help Blender run better on Windows, but only Windows. This isn't anything new: it is just a new generation of their 'embrace, extend (and extinguish)' mantra. They want to get open source projects running better on Windows than Linux, and I can just imagine their revival of the 'Get the Facts' website if they do. But It isn't going to happen.

What I see is that this is going to cause a backlash *against* Blender development for Windows. For those people that do use Blender on Windows, I hope that this doesn't happen. Don't punish the users for MS's interference.

If MS wants to help open source projects, than that is a good thing, but only as long as that support is open (ie. if they share their jewels, they share them with the world, not hidden behind NDAs), and that the projects get to choose how that support is used.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[wootest]

It's interesting to compare this to Microsoft's own research and actual usage data backing the entire redesign effort, which showed several real problems and which led the work.

I'm not all that in love with most other parts of Office 2007, especially not the underlying politics and company guiding the OOXML bullshit and anything-open-has-cooties thinking. But I have read up on how the redesign happened, point by point, and I can't fault them for not doing their homework.

It's a solid piece of engineering and craftsmanship (if you remove the horrendous branding like the "Office button"), but it's hard to judge the merits of the interface based on the first iteration of it, plagued by lack of customization and immense culture shock in anyone who sees it. The application of the interface to the programs might not have worked so well in practice as they thought it would in theory, but I think it's also fairly clear that "stay the course" would not have worked that well for that long.

Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces

[thtrgremlin]

Agreed, if you saying what I think you saying. People that gripe about Blenders interface are not people that know it; it is all people, imho, that took one look at the simple boxy interface and giant menus, and maybe clicked on the cube with the left mouse button to discover nothing happens, and were immediately turned off, if not outright upset. That was my reaction. Once I finally took the time to learn it (years later after seeing demo videos) other people would watch me work in Blender and would be like WHAT!?! How do you do that? and I would say It is easy, but you must at least watch the interface tutorials (youtube's super3boy tutorials are great for starters, mind you he sounds 12 years old.

Re:!GPL != EVIL

[mrslacker]

Thanks for pointing out how important it is not to rush into your comments.

Just because something is GPL doesn't automatically mean that GNU made it.

As I said, many embedded Linux systems contain _no_ GNU tools or libraries. This is nothing to do with BSD, but it _is_ a common misconception, even if it's not what you meant to say.

"Art of War" is gutenberg.org/etext/132

[Anomalyst]

You may find a copy of Sun-Tzu's "Art of War" at your local [bookstore]

Since it has been out of copyright for a couple thousand years, it is far cheaper to get it from Project Gutenberg, though a small donation wouldn't hurt. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/132 [gutenberg.org]
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20594 [gutenberg.org] Audio book

philosophy of the founding of the USA

[falconwolf]

The USA was founded on the principal of 'freedom for the individual'. This shows with the USA's weak social welfare systems, and business culture of domination at all cost.

Freedom for the individual, not for business. Thomas Jefferson, the writer and one of the signers of the "Declaration of Independence" and the third President of the USA, even wrote a warning about corporations and the corporate aristocracy [indymedia.org]: "I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and to bid defiance to the laws of their country."

Falcon