The Abandoned Arts

        Remember the time you got your digital camera, scanner, or DV Camera, and installed the editing software provided on the CD, only to be confronted by a mass of ugly, textured oval buttons, weird misshapen menu systems, confusing and unlabeled buttons, and the BSOD every time you tried to follow the directions in the help menu? Youre not alone.

        Millions of computer users worldwide are faced with this problem. The makers of a piece of hardware are distributing it with the cheapest software they can find. What usually results; a featureless, undocumented, buggy program, whose textured dialogues, animated icons and poorly coordinated color scheme could send an epileptic into seizure.

        Most victims of this cruel treatment are Windows users, the most popular PC OS today. I'm certain that Mac users have the same problem. But a big problem there is, is that not a lot of hardware even supports the Mac OS. Despite your operating system, shoddy cheap software, most with custom GUIs, plague everyone at sometime.

        A good example is video editing software. Most people with a way to put video on their computer (be it web cam or DV) have installed the default software (lets say Ulead Video Studio) and have been confronted with aggravating prompts trying to lead you through the pages of the software as it captures, edits, and saves your project. First time you stray from the path, or try to change a setting you are stuck trying to decipher the unhelpful little stylized glyphs on buttons, and facing more Illegal Operations than Saddam Hussein.

        On the other side of the spectrum, take a professional program like Adobe Premier. Intuitive interface, a common-sense layout, advanced yet easy to use options, and no restricting beginning to end flow, just you and your project. Notice one major difference in the GUIs of the two programs: unnecessary decoration. Just using Ulead Video Studio makes you feel bloated as the megabytes of unnecessary and frivolous graphics are pouring into your memory, using the precious RAM you need to edit and render your video!

        In my experience, there has been a constant in computer software that has yet to be broken: The graphic-intensiveness of software is inversely proportionate to its usefulness and overall quality. The more time the producers wasted on style and pizzazz the less they spent on functionality, layout, and debugging.

        Thats a hint for all you software producers out there; stop making good looking software that doesn't work! Id rather it do its job and look like crap then have matching color schemes, transparent textures, and a Blue Screen every time I play with the settings.