You don't seem to agree with the post as a whole, so I'm curious:
1) Did you expect the post to include reviews of applications, so you could learn from that, or
2) Do you think the design quality of FOSS is high enough?
If it's the latter, I'd love to know your examples of apps that meet the criteria I listed:
- Is free to use
- Has open source code
- Has a user base that doesn’t primarily consist of software developers
- Has a GUI
- Is mainly created and maintained by volunteers
Is there one you would recommend over commercial alternatives _because of_ its design?
Hey, thanks for the feedback. As I guess you know writing concisely isn't easy. I mainly write about design, for designers. I can't remember having every seen anyone recommend a volunteer-driven FOSS application _for its UI design_ over commercial alternatives. I do hear people complaining about free tools for being annoying to use. As such, I didn't consider it necessary to make the case that volunteer-driven FOSS is badly designed—I wanted to share what reasons I found for _how_ that came to be.
tl:dr; users should not be frustrated with FOSS and developers should not be frustrated with users using proprietary alternatives, because we'd have to live in a completely different alternative universe for that to be different.
My agenda is that I want more non-developers to be involved in FOSS, so that volunteer-driven FOSS projects get more traction.
Hi thanks for the feedback! About my writing style in general: I usually write as if I'm writing to my younger self, telling him what I wished he learned faster. Perhaps I should be kinder to him. I'll be careful not to mean to others next time. However, I don't feel like we have to be nice to the 'web thought leaders' who have cashed in their tokens for real money already. They're the grifters. The stories from people making real money from selling crypto are to be found everywhere, but obvs that pyramid scheme/lottery situation means that lots of others lost their money. I hear too little from them.
I was genuinely pissed off about all the time I put in trying to read all that techno babble various blockchain websites only to find out that most of them are just a scheme to turn tokens into money. I'm disappointed in the tech community for not being more vocal against the hype. So I wanted to put out there what I learned, so that others can see things not through the lens of 'next big thing', but 'possibly made by someone who wants my money'.
As other commenters have pointed out, environment and context of an individual are often stronger than the individuals themselves. I thought I was tough, resilient and mindful. Then the pandemic came and I couldn’t choose not to feel stressed and distracted.
I’m not much of a programmer. I learned Vue and Webpack just for this project. Or actually: I wanted a project to learn how to make web apps and that turned out to be the most attractive way.
I hope it’s useful to someone out here. Let me know how you would improve it!