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Old 24-04-2015, 05:26 PM
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RickS (Rick)
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Join Date: Apr 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by codemonkey View Post
Mostly the GUI; not because of how it looks as such, but because of UX concerns. In my opinion, if you have to explain something to a user you've already lost, and I don't think there's much in the PI UI that's intuitive.

Take for instance the icons in the screenshot. Being a software developer, I like to think I know a bit about computers and I need the tooltips to tell what these things do. Again, I don't think there's anything intuitive about PI.
I agree that those icons are somewhat arbitrary. I don't know what you could pick that would be an intuitive icon for "make a process image" but you could probably come up with something better for global apply or dynamic preview.

I think a statement that there's nothing intuitive about PI is rather too strong. Perhaps some poetic licence there Most of the GUI is typical drag and drop, menus, scroll bars, etc. They are a little different from the native Windows or Mac versions but hardly difficult to pick up.

Anyway, I think we can agree that the UI is a bit funky. That's partly the price to be paid for cross platform support.

Quote:
Originally Posted by codemonkey View Post
My other concerns are a bit more contentious and you might argue that PixInsight simply isn't meant to do this. My take on things are that most users don't care at all about how things are done, they just want them done. They don't want to read details about a myriad of algorithms (and they'll probably forget most of it as soon as they've read it anyway) to do what they consider to be basic tasks. They just want it to work so they can do what they need to go and get on with their lives. People don't have much spare time and the more they have to think about a UI, the less time they have for the things that are really important to them. I feel it's the responsibility of UX designers and application developers to abstract those details.

The flip side to that is by exposing all this detail you have as much input/control as possible, and you might argue that this is PI's niche.
I'm happy with robust algorithms, often with references to the original academic papers they came from, with all the parameters visible and tweakable. I agree that's a niche and I think it's fine that PI doesn't appeal to everyone. There are other packages that are simpler and easier to pick up. CCDStack is a good example. I found it easy to learn and got reasonable results from it. I put more effort into learning PI but I get correspondingly better results. Not everybody wants to make that investment and that's cool...

Cheers,
Rick.
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