Digital Art Zone

Kendall Sears - 16 July 2012 05:40 AM

... a control interface…

Herein lies the problem, the control in this case refers to the person creating the interface. For anyone who had a VCR, think of how many had blinking 0:00 clocks because the ‘engineers’ couldn’t design a user friendly and consistent interface for something as simple as setting the clock. On top of this, if one has to go through a ‘control interface’ they are limited as to what that interface allows them, which often prevents addressing the real problem that some engineer through no fault of their own but through the limits of our ability to preconceive every possibility, didn’t design for. Add to that the push for getting things on the market that means they go out half baked and often never get fixed… not a scenario I want to be caught in.

In an open structure, We can write tools that can modify things without having to go through a specific application. If that appication is corrupt and won’t start, we can potentially fix the underlying structure, restart/reload the application and reinitialize it. The method DS uses for managing content is in my view correct. It follows more modern formats for dealing with the type of data it deals with (different then bank transactional data for instance where a more controlled database is necessary.) The solution lies, I believe, in external tools and better standards.

Personally, I wouldn’t change a line of code in DS itself, other than to expand the types of 3D content and other applications it can work with. The base program as I envision it would act like a hub for managing 3D content that could be used in a variety of environments, by a variety of tools, but would do this in an open flexible way.

All of this is of course an opinion, and by definition no better than anyone elses.

The other related issue is that we only have finite resources to work with. If DS developers take on the task of trying to provide this ‘controlled interface’ it will eat up those resources at an unprecedented pace. I have seen this first hand as a major issue, possibly *the* major issue, in software development. If their resources are tied up there, they don’t have them available to maintain much less expand functionality of the product in an ever changing dynamic environment. The result typically is that the product becomes less relevant to the environment it exists in and dies.

Sometimes we need to let go of some of the control to become flexible enough to survive and grow. Let others join in, like the open source community aims for. Not necessarily going totally open source, but learning from the example of how keeping an open framework that others can ‘easily’ develop tools to play in our playground can vastly expand functionality for free essentially.

Btw, my opinions are © Gedd @ DAZ forums. If one wishes to quote them all or in part, please do so with attribution. They may not be great, but they are mine ;p