Friday, October 02, 2009
Proving that open source can be beautiful
It is out. We have Funambol V8 on our demo site, myFUNAMBOL. It is for everyone to play with, look at and experience (yes, it is free, and unlimited for our community members).Why am I excited? Because I am a usability guy, and I love things that are both usable and look good. I am an admirer of Apple, because of it. And I feel I can say this (ok, I am biased, I know): our portal looks better than anything Apple has out in the market.
There is one thing that people say about open source: it works, it works, but it is ugly. Think about it: few products out there are open source and actually look great (there are some exceptions, although I think Firefox is uglier than Chrome or even IE8). Open source products just work great. They are super-well tested. They function well, they are designed by engineers for engineers... Usually, they are ugly.
It was about time to turn this around. We are a company with Italian roots after all. If made-in-Italy can't build beautiful things, who can?
Here you have it. Funambol V8 is made-in-Italy software, works great because it is open source and tested by millions, can be tailor-made, and it looks fashionable.
Living proof that open source can be beautiful. It does not have to be ugly.
Posted by Fabrizio at 10:36
4 Comments:
Iosè said...
Congratulation on this product release! Great softwares have to be "useful", "usable" yet "beautiful". Italian sense of beauty helps you a lot there. I wonder if it was developed inside a Ferrari but maybe you just make your sw designers eat spaghetti allo scoglio. It should be funny discovering it is designed in US and branded as italian..whatever I like it too much! ;-)
Comment Posted at 03:52
byla said...
Hi there
Congrats for launching the product..
And even though I am a big fan of your blog, a bit less-of-a-fan of your open source syncml solution, I have some reservations about statements of great usability and design of your newest app.
saying you guys polished the usability and design is just a little bit over-glorifying the reality. The design honestly looks like an apple rip off done by, yes, outsource community. With icons, colour palette and buttons. It has open source design feel written all over it.
The whole system is not particularly snappy (actually it times out quite often), so the user experience somewhat fails due to that. Overall functionality should be click event specific, but it is not. I can click on edit even though I have nothing selected. And of course, I get no message saying what should I do. Search is exact term only, so that is a bit non - usable.
Clicking on mail icon if I do not have mail hooked up, does nothing in most cases, in some it throws you to your home tab.
Downloading client to my phone was the next fail in experience. I tried a few times, and all I get: rejected by the host.
Email sync is a another ?. Given the fact most of your users will be first time users (I guess), it would be very nice to explain to them, why do you need all the info you are asking for. And on my side, after providing different-from-registration mail, the system hanged without any warning.
So, after a failed phone sync, failed mail sync without any proper explanations, all I am left out with is calendar. And it is pretty nice, I admit, just the design continuously reminds me of a linux_operator-desperate-to-use-photoshop-but-he-is-stuck-with-gimp wanna be designer looking for clues on apple design themes. As a result - it looks like a failed copy.
So even though I deeply respect all the stuff you guys do, I cannot stands still on claims stating that this particular product is polished from a user perspective and design. This is exaggeration the italian way. It has a long way to reach de-facto high usability and design standards that you are mentioning and talking about on your blog.
Comment Posted at 06:39
Fabrizio said...
Hi Byla,
thanks for your long post.
At least, thanks for saying it is an improvement :-) I know, we can do better, we will do better. It is nice to always have higher goals.
The lack of snappiness might have compromised a bit your judgment. That is due to HW resources, which we are working on, rather than the interface.
But I take your criticism positively. We'll get there, one day.
fabrizio
Comment Posted at 07:30
Love the new portal and the product as a whole. It's too bad there's such a large gap between the community version and the carrier edition. I know there are lots of service providers who would love to offer a commercial version of the product, but on a much smaller scale than your carrier edition.
