Microsoft Reaches Out To Blender 444
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."
Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:1, Insightful)
This is a message directed towards all people who are not familiar with 3d applications. Most 3d applications have historically had interfaces that deviate from the standard application interface. Get over it.
As someone who has been toying with various 3d applications since 1990 and having taken some time to learn Blender recently I can say this. Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive and effcient.
How to improve the user experience on Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Makes me think of cowboys... (Score:4, Insightful)
Irony, much? (Score:5, Insightful)
"support FOSS application"????? (Score:4, Insightful)
There, fixed it for you. Microsoft doesn't want "open sores" (as microsoft shills used to call it), which Ballmer once likened to cancer, on their operating system.
If they could make Windows so it only ran Microsoft programs without losing any Windows sales, they would.
-mcgrew
Don't Read The Article (Score:1, Insightful)
Blender got an e-mail from MS, how about we hear something from blender or MS, not some anonymous blogger.
FOSS on Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
here's the thing:
If you can't figure out what stuff does without a video tutorial, then it is *by definition* not intuitive.
I've used 3D application since the late 80's (started with Sculpt-Animate 4D, and have used *many* applications since), and Blender's interface is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'd say it's worse than ever Caligari (the first version) in that at least with Caligari I could actually navigate.
I tried learning Blender recently, and downloaded a video tutorial. The guy presenting it repeatedly used the word "intuitive" - even going so far as to say something like this:
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
Re:Don't Read The Article (Score:3, Insightful)
News is information someone doesn't want you to know.
Everything else is advertising.
And so it begins (Score:5, Insightful)
So you're moving towards bribery and pollution of international standards bodies and open mockery of the idea of open and standard formats?
Sorry, but after that I would have told him where he could shove it.
It is not going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I have read of the original posts on the Blender site, it looks like the Blender project will tell Microsoft to go away.
After the OOXML fiasco — Microsoft must truly be deluded to think this is a good example of their openness policy — it is only right that the Blender project, knowing what would happen to them in the end, should reject Microsoft.
Have about opening the MS formats (Score:5, Insightful)
What, it's ok for MS to charge people to use their software, but it's not ok to expect MS to shell out some money for other people's software? MS wants the software for free?!?!
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:2, Insightful)
It's the start that's the problem, but when you learn it - it is more as just "quite intuitive and efficient".
Re:"support FOSS application"????? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day when 3d applications were on Digital, Mac, and Irix machines microsoft focused on getting them ported to NT. This did a good job of killing Digital, Irix, and Apple. Getting Blender, IMHO the 3d tool with the most rapidly growing community, to run "best" on Windows would help thwart adoption of Linux. Not just adoption by users but adoption by hardware makers. If you can keep hardware makers focused on building for your platform, users will not leave.
Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Dumb corporation directive (Score:5, Insightful)
Result: people might have better experience working with those formats when they use Blender on Windows. -> That would make it more attractive to use Windows as underlying platform (if support for those file formats matter to you).
In other words: give a competitive advantage to using Windows, make it less attractive to move to a FOSS operating system.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a message directed towards all people who are not familiar with 3d applications. Most 3d applications have historically had interfaces that deviate from the standard application interface. Get over it.
As someone who has been toying with various 3d applications since 1990 and having taken some time to learn Blender recently I can say this. Blender's interface is actually quite intuitive and effcient.
Keyboard shortcuts often make for a more efficient workflow, but *having* to use them makes for a much steeper learning curve.
Re:Irony, much? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for your battle plan, MS! It's too bad the Blender folks didn't pull a reverse-409 style scam and draw out a new round of Halloween-style Documents.
mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly so. If Microsoft really wants to improve the software... then commit your own programmers to the project and put your improvements back into the community.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
How about... (Score:3, Insightful)
That seems like a good place to start.
Re:"support FOSS application"????? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that, once people start using OO, Firefox, etc., they will eventually realize that they can run that exact same software on a free OS.
The shock of changing the OS and the office suite is a lot. However, if you can transition one little piece at a time, Windows is in trouble.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:1, Insightful)
Which is EXACTLY the point the AC up there ^^^ was making. If you have to "take some time to learn it" then it is not intuitive BY DEFINITION. Something simply can't be intuitive AND have a steep learning curve--they're mutually exclusive. That so many people here seem to want to argue this point just shows how very screwed up some within the OSS community can be, and how out of whack interface priorities actually are.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:4, Insightful)
Fool me once... (Score:1, Insightful)
If some weird guy on the street always punches you in the face when you walk past him, do you not assume he will do it this time too? Does that make you a weird-guy-walking-around-on-the-street-punching-people-hater?
There's a reason people dislike Microsoft.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Good documentation will carry a mediocre interface better than poor documentation will carry a great interface.
You're crazy! (Score:5, Insightful)
If file formats are not a problem, than a simple, "We're fine for now, but when the issue comes up, I will pass your contact information on to developer with trouble, here's my vCard, let's keep in touch," would be fine.
Microsoft isn't passing any judgment here. Windows competes with Linux in the marketplace, Blender is an application that runs on Windows and Linux, the company that makes Windows reaches out offering to help because they want Blender to run really well on Windows.
It's not about Microsoft WANTING the software for free, the Blender guys GIVE the software away for free, to Microsoft and everyone else. This is simply Microsoft realizing that their competition with Linux and other Open Source PROJECTS doesn't mean that other applications should be supported as well as other third party developers. I'm sure that Microsoft gives Adobe support because they want Adobe products to run as well or better on Windows as Mac OS X, now they are offering support to Blender.
The Blender guys may not need/want that support, but this is Microsoft "getting it," and Slashdot users NOT "getting it." The software marketplace is not proprietary vs. open source, it's not non-Free vs. free, it's product area by product area. I find it unlikely that Microsoft would offer support to the Open Office guys, because OO running better on Windows hurts their market leading Microsoft Office product, but other areas that Microsoft doesn't compete in, they can offer them support.
I would expect MS to be willing to support The Gimp writers as that program gets better, because Microsoft is indifferent between users running Windows/Photoshop and Windows/Gimp, and would like EITHER scenario better than OSX/Photoshop, OSX/Gimp, or Linux/Gimp.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
This is called "consistent" not "intuitive".
Re:"support FOSS application"????? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd really rather not. It's an even worse echo chamber than slashdot. Ballmer's letter is just raw meat to the crowd of screaming sychophants.
I mean, I got a bitter chuckle out of the OOXML reference too, but I don't let that tear away all objective thought with regard to the letter -- my first impression of which is "Blender just got some serious recognition". I'm sure Groklaw is full of oh-so-clever analysis about how MS is out to get Blender, because we all know how serious they are about making 3D modeling apps...
Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
"The buttons don't work the way you'd expect, but once you get used to it, it's really intuitive."
If you don't get how hilarious this is, then you don't know the meaning of the word "intuitive".
I've never used Blender and can't comment on whether or not its UI is intuitive. I intend only to reply to your comments about the meaning of "intuitive".
To an extent, I agree with you. However, being "intuitive" doesn't necessarily only mean that it's immediately obvious how to use it. Sometimes your initial perception of the basic UI concept doesn't match that of the developers, but once you shift your perception accordingly, then it become intuitive.
Basically, you may encounter a UI that makes no sense to you. Then you learn how it works, but each time you go to do an action, you have to stop and think about how to do it, and rely on memorized steps. This is not an intuitive interface.
On the other hand, you may encounter a UI that makes no sense to you, but once you grasp the UI's concept, you find that you don't have to rely on memorized steps, they just make sense based on your new understanding of the UI concept. That's a UI that has become intuitive.
In other words, it's intuitive to a person who understands the concept. All you have to do is learn the concept.
Re:It is not going to happen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Never believe promises when dealing with a company like MS. Require signed legal documents, reviewed by a very good lawyer.
Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft doesn't get it. Most people don't get how open source projects work.
Open source projects improve (or are influenced most) by getting patches accepted to the project.
Microsoft is full of developers, developers, developers. Why not just submit some patches that improve blender's performance on Windows?
Google did that with Wine. They wanted Picasa to work in Wine. Guess what they did. They threw money and patches at it. [google.com]
Take a look at the kernel and how it has changed because companies wanted it to do something and submitted patches. That's how it works.
Microsoft is a software company that somehow can't figure out how to submit a patch. Sad. Patch up or shut up.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:!GPL != EVIL (Score:2, Insightful)
Are you suggesting that nothing has improved since the formation of the FSF in 1985?
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about helping the "community" (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft vs. Sun was obvious, Sun was stupid. Microsoft wanted to sell Windows, that meant making sure that Java apps ran best on Windows. Microsoft wants to sell Windows, so that means making Java apps that run on windows run best (or only) on Windows. Sun wanted to make Windows irrelevant with Java apps. In what universe were Microsoft and Sun's business interests aligned?
There is no "open source community." There are software projects released under Open Source Licenses, and their are "open source projects" that have community developers. There are also corporate projects and University projects that are released under "open source licenses." The only "community" angle is that code under the BSD/MIT licenses are available to everyone, and code under the GPL is available to everyone.
Microsoft doesn't care if you are a corporation or a "community," they care if your software helps them sell software (in which case they help you), or hurts them selling software (in which case they try to crush you). With open source projects, their existing channels don't work for either help/crush, so they have a new position for helping... I'm sure they have another department for crushing competitive open source projects, but that departments send out nastygrams from Legal or FUD from PR, not emails of help from the liaison office.
Re:Irony, much? (Score:5, Insightful)
OOXML is very bad for doing its own thing where it could instead be using existing XML standards. I think this makes ODF a better starting point for creating an open XML format for documents than OOXML. From a technical standpoint, ODF has many advantages over OOXML due to a cleaner design. And where it has weaknesses, they are much more likely to be fixed.
OOXML also has no actual implementations yet. The company that pushed the standard may never actually implement it themselves, let alone anyone else. Interop is likely going to be a nightmare. The standard is so large that there are bound to be many rough edges where interpretations differ. And in this case, there is no reference implementation to use. You could try looking at Office 2007 documents, but they aren't actually standard OOXML either. Worse yet, most office suits will want to handle Office 2007 files with the same filter, so the code will need to deal with multiple variants of this "standard".
So I agree that ODF does need to be cleaned up. We need to make sure compatibility is actually being delivered. I think the promises and hype from the ODF camp are greater than the reality right now. But it is pretty premature to say that OOXML doesn't have compatibility issues, given there are no implementations yet. Though neither is perfect, I have much more hope for ODF than I do OOXML.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:2, Insightful)
>> interface, but I'm going to prelude these comments with a comment about them
>> anyways.
Eh, how does the interface relate to this story? I mean, that was guarenteed to start Yet Another Slashdot Blender UI Flame Fest.
And for you blender UI haters (for the thousandth time) blender's UI is designed to be fast and easy to use, not easy to learn (and it is consistent with itself, yes, just not with other apps). Back when the UI was initially designed, a hotkey-based app was one of the fastest ways to work (pie/radial/marking menus hadn't become popular yet, for that matter they arn't popular now). However it's not particularly easy to learn such an app, especially back before we had header menus so users could at least find the function in the menu and see it's associated hotkey. There's also been significant technical difficulties with the UI code (though there's a project ongoing now to fix that, and hopefully allow much UI improvement).
Maya, (as an example of an app people find easy to learn and fast to use once they learn how to configure it) uses marking menus (basically pie menus) to replace the need to memorize tons of hotkeys. Hotkeys have the advantage of settling into your muscle memory; normals menus do not, nor do icons, but pie menus work fairly well for this. So instead of having tons of hotkeys, you put things into pie menus, which makes the user interface much more discoverable (if done right) and intuitive, especially if users can build their own menus and assign them to custom hotkeys.
Other then the marking menus, I personally think maya's UI is not well designed (it's customizable in the ways as I'd like, for example). However from what I can tell, the marking menus combined with what customizability is there works really well for people. Pie menus have been investigated for use in blender in the past, and will probably be considered again as part of the 2.5 event/ui refactor project.
Joe
Not Supporting, they are Subverting (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft has never ever supported open standards and no amount of OOXML will ever support that fact.
Microsoft's attempt is to subvert the true meaning of open source and to beguile and lie to those not smart enough to understand the real reason behind open source.
Microsoft's offerings have been nothing but opened source and that is a universe away from Open Source concepts.
Microsoft is run by a bunch of nuts if they think that we can't see that this is nothing more than their:
embrace, extend, extinguish
tactic.
Their demise won't come soon enough.
In the end open source will meet or exceed any closed source offering. This means that all features, concepts, capabilities will be equal to or better than in the closed source world. What this will relegate Windows to, and there's nothing wrong with it, is a gaming console type application. You'll only use it when and if you want to play games.
The transition to open source is inevitable. The world is far too large and there are too many people that know about how Microsoft does business. Big named companies are now involved. They know how to diffuse the obfuscated veil that Microsoft is draping over the eyes of the average fanboy worshiping at the feet of the criminal monopolist.
Does Ballmer really want the answer (Score:5, Insightful)
#1: Fix filenames and filesystem so they match Unix. This means you use the forward slash. Refuse to "microsoft certify" any software that will not accept a pasted or typed filename with a forward slash in it, and change all the OS api that returns filenames to return forward slashes (probably with a registry setting) and again refuse to "microsoft certify" software that fails when this setting is on. And get rid of the damn drive letters (just make "/A:/" be the same as "A:/") and support UTF-8 encoding of the filenames at all times (probably by changing the "a" version of the win32 api to be hard-coded to UTF-8).
#2: Support OpenGL, meaning that by default you get at least what Mesa provides. Supporting OpenGL 1.4 only is not acceptable.
#3: Support C99 standard functions and don't make your compiler spew a lot of bogus "warnings" that you put in there to try to encourage people to change to your windows-specific functions. Remove the underscores you stuck on lots of the functions so that portable useful code cannot be written.
Re:!GPL != EVIL (Score:5, Insightful)
You got it completely backwards.
It is the GPL license which induced a lot of people to contribute to the Linux kernel instead of a BSD-licensed ... BSD system, which predates Linux by decades.
The fact that because the BSD license did not guarantee that one's contribution will not end up being sold back to the contributor by some greedy fuck, is what turned a majority of contributors away from BSD and other similar licenses. It is why a vast majority of FOSS is licensed under the GPL.
See above. If it were not for GPL, a "most recent" Linux kernel would be still a version 0.6 curiosum found in cob-web covered corners of Usenet and the most widely known Linux-alike system would be BSD with a fraction of a following of today's Linux. It is the GPL which made all the difference. And we have an empirical proof for that: BSD and its forks.
Skipping for the moment the fact that the Linux kernel is developed using the GNU toolchain and that no Linux system can even boot without a whole core set of GNU libraries and tools, it is the GPL which allowed for the growth of Linux. If linux were to be re-licensed to MIT or BSD today, probably (judging by their words on LKML) 80% kernel developers would drop out of the project instantaneously.
Yes! How dare these bastards stop you from taking their shit and selling it for your profit! I mean the chutzpa they have! Lazy unemployed beggars all!
Tolkien clearly wrote Microsoft's history (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Irony, much? (Score:2, Insightful)
Holy shit, they are?! So they decided not to go with OOXML, after all?
Re:How to improve the user experience on Windows? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because maybe MS' approaching Blender is more about anti-trust [arstechnica.com] than Windows itself? Is Blender used in education [cdschools.org] at all? Methinks if the recent antitrust brouhaha in Europe over interoperability gains any steam, Microsoft is going to work in advance to keep those charges from propagating to the U.S. Perhaps Blender is the first step since it can also provide a supply of XBox developers and thus cover both of Microsoft's platforms.
Re:And so it begins (Score:3, Insightful)
Following suit is not innovation. MIght be incremental improvements which is nice, but not innovation which we sorely need in the IT field..
Re:In the direction of... (Score:3, Insightful)
If it results in file incompatibility or rendering differences in between documents from MSWord and those opened by other programs, then it doesn't matter if it is listed as "deprecated" or "optional" or "monkey poo." It still is preventing the interoperability truly open standards are designed to remove.
ODF has a working, open source reference implementation. While the standard as written has a few snags, it's not like developers can't and don't just look to see how OO.org and Workplace did it if there is any question about making sure things are interoperable. OOXML doesn't even have a complete closed source implementation that can be blackbox tested for interoperability. Sorry, OOXML is late to the game and severely lacking in real world ability to seamlessly exchange interoperable documents.
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Message to people who gripe about interfaces (Score:3, Insightful)
For $895 - $995 it should be able to make what I want based on what I'm thinking.
http://shop.newtek.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=7 [newtek.com]