[geeks] SGI users looking for software

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Oct 21, 2002 at 08:52:51AM -0400, Kurt Huhn wrote:

> I respectfully disagree.  Friendliness is not a measure of how useful a
> piece of software is, it's a measure of how easy it is to learn and become
> adept at.  Lightwave 5.6, for example, is not friendly.  BrylCAD is
> downright hostile.  On the other end of the spectrum, Wings is very
> friendly.  Rhino practically caters to every whim.  Now, you may have a
> point about stripping out unneeded features - but that has nothing to do
> with freindliness, it only removes features that aren't necessary to the
> target audience.  One could coherently argue that BrylCAD and Rhino are
> targeted at the same audience, but there's a huge difference in the
> friendlyiness between the two.  

I wouldn't say that BRL-CAD and Rhino are aimed at the same audience.
BRL-CAD is aimed at a more scientific market from what I've seen.

Anyway, if an appication has the features, but is hard for anyone to
use, it obviously isn't very powerful.

But what do you want from these high end packages?  To spill all their
secrets on the GUI right away would mean an aweful amount of screen
clutter. 

In my opinion, a well designed graphics application is one that studies
what operations people use the most, and puts them immediately at their
finger tips.  It then should make it fairly easy to do common but not
constant tasks, and finally make it easy to figure out how to do the
arcane stuff, assuming a basic level of familiarity with the
application.  

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd