dflemstr said:
Also, chill out! This quote would have been all you would have had to write and I would have understood:
I'm chilled. Just trying to provide everything - especailly quotes - that you might need to follow what I was saying without inferring something else.
dflemstr said:
Of course this all happened because I'm too lazy to reread the thread every once in a while so you can blame it all on me I guess...
Well, that's why I tried to put more in my next post... so everything you needed was "right there"
WizardStan said:
Am I the only one feeling some irony in this thread?
"It's too hard to click-click-click-save to SD. It should be nice and simple like the Wii with its click-click-click-buy"
(I'm saying that there is no real difference between clicking through a categorized website and going through the Wiishop channel, and anyone who uses it as an example of how things should be should re-evaluate what exactly they are arguing about)
Crikey. I wrote a reply to this which I've just cut because it looked like a flaming rant! LOL. which it wasn't meant to be. Let's have another go.
The idea is simplification, so that "innocents" who do not know Linux (or even computers) can "just do it". It's to look and feel "inviting" rather than offputting, and to avoid Pandora customers getting the feeling they have to LEARN not just how to use their Pandora, but even just how to get new games for it! these people might be used to buying a game in the local game shop in town and pushing it into their console when they want to play it. The idea isn't to make it impossible to learn Linux, or terms like "download","save","store","load","run","repository" or even, perhaps, "file" and so on but to make them not be mandatory. To make obtaining and maintaining software (via updates) "just work" without training the users that don't want to be trained.
There's a principle in most stores - ESPECIALLY online stores (but not supermarkets so much) - that I think applies here. That principle is to remove everything from the experience that causes the customer to think about anything except the goods on offer. In a store that's mostly so they can extract the maximum amount from your wallet, but the principle is still sound - rather than force people to think of their Space Invaders maching as a computer that you have to do this, that, and the other with (man working for machine) you get the machine to do the boring repetitive stuff like looking for updates (made possible by a better back-end than a simple file dump) and organising the information in the way that you want.
For example, I'd quite like my default view of "the software available to you" to be "what's new" - what has changed or been added since my last visit. But I might also REALLY quite like the Pandora version of "Qwak" (say) and want to display just all software by Jamie Woodhouse (author) or from publishign house 2D-Boy or...
So the idea is to be able to put almost ANY face on the front end, and to accomplish that to put a more capable back-end on the data. The front-end should minimise what the users brain has to do, from the POV of an "inncoent" to computing terms. Looking like an online store is no bad thing, not "just" because an online store may involve fewer clicks, but because an online store purposefully is designed to show off not how clever the user is, or the manufacturer, or even the store - an online store is designed to vanish into the background as much as possible, to be imperceptable so that the gap between the user and the software he's contemplating is reduced to it's barest minimum.
IMHO.
Personally, perhaps because I'm not QUITE as innocent as the target market that we're talking about here, I've been quite impressed with the way fairly standard Linux repositories work. Ubuntu 8.04 has a repository which works quite well, and an "Install or Remove" application that sits on top of that, if you want, to simplify things even more. IIRC the 9.04 repository increases user-friendliness and approaches the store-like approach (with things like screen shots of programs that you have not downloaded yet) so it seems to me that Linux is already mvoing in an app-store-like direction (regardless of the commercial aspect - it's the "obtaining software" side that they seem to be addressing, and doing well at).
It's seemed/seems rather odd to me that the Pandora software pool seems to be taking several steps backwards from that approach - instead of making it even easier to find what you want, recognise it, and get it running the Pandora File Archive does one thing right - it centralises the software. Almost everything else seems to be a retrograde step compared to other things available now, including Linux (an OS deeply entrenched in the Pandora philosophy). The File Archive is "geeky", and that limits who it will appeal to IMHO. Broadening the appeal will hopefull broaden the market.
Bah. Still too long and sermonish, so I'm going to stop about here. I haven't paid enough attention to dflemstr's solution, partly because it looked like too much effort (esp. with no Pandora in-hand) and boring (after all, I CAN browse a file archive!) but generally speaking I must continue to be behind the idea of increasing ease-of-use of downloading and maintaining software. Something like dflemstr Package Manager plus Craig's desire to be ABLE to charge (or accept donations) could be great IMHO. We could even go look in "Pandora's Box" (repository) and filter it to only show what we currently have installed in order to leave comments, or add "If you like this program then you'll love THAT program" recommendations... it's all about designing the back end to be able to provide as much flexibility as possible, and then leveraging that on the front end (or front ends?).
Bah. On the downside, of course, this might all take more server power and more bandwidth (for the pretty front end) than a simple file dump.
