Monday
3 Dec 2007
User Interface of the Day: Splashup.com
The growth in popularity of digital cameras has brought along with it a heightened interest in image editing software. Everybody knows Photoshop, but noteverybody can afford it. Enter the free Web apps! Recently one of our readers directed our attention to the edit imaging site splashup.com.
Our thoughts are below.
What’s Cool: I wanted to like this. At least the visual style of the interface isn’t unappealing!
What’s Not Cool: Splashup feels like it was made by someone who tried to recreate “Photoshop” by having seen a screenshot years ago. For someone who does lots of image editing, I couldn’t use this at all. Not only was the interface aggravatingly unresponsive (which is probably a Flash problem), it required endless clicking, wasting my time at every action and threatening to give me Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. Things started badly when I resized the window to take advantage of my larger screen, and then had to battle the MDI interface to also increase the image’s window’s size — and then every tool palette — separately. Next, to my horror I discovered that there no keyboard shortcuts for anything. There isn’t even a way to Undo without using the menus! Later, I discovered that what I thought were little rotate buttons in a tool palette were Undo/Redo buttons, but those are small and take forever to target. The incomprehensible click orgy continues throughout the interface. The best example of this is the gradient picker, where you can’t change an end-points color by clicking on its color swatch. Instead, you have to click to select it, then find another color swatch located out of the way and click that, which opens a color dialog far away. The little buttons to accept transformations appear without any fanfare — I missed them for a long time.
There are so many problems that I can’t possibly sum them up here. I’ll talk about one: depressing inconsistency. They’ve implemented two ways to interact with choosing options for things like fonts, colors, and filters. The first is a modal dialog that covers most of your work and must manually dississed; the second is a non-modal panel that appears below the menu-bar and doesn’t interrupt your work. The first method is horrible, the second is decent. I’d have some sympathy if they didn’t know better and only had a modal method — that’s just ignorance — but they’ve spent the time to implement a good solution and only use it sporadically — that’s cruelty. Similarly, they implement a nice version of transparent messages[xxx Needs link], but they only use it once: when you use the full-screen option. No doubt, they were copying YouTube). Despite this existing piece of functionality, they persist in using harmful monologue boxes.
And then there are the bugs: Fonts didn’t render correctly at large sizes, it lost my work, … I’ll just stop now, shall I?
So? They tried to make a simple Photoshop clone — which they could have done by “monkey see, monkey do” — and failed. I’ts interfaces like Splashup that give GUIs a bad name. They appear easy while actually being slow and aggravating to use. I’m left with the impression that the creators have never used their own software. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe released this as anti-marketing, to secretly convince people that buying Photoshop is really worth it.
What’s Cool: Until this program, I had not been able to find a free equivalent of Fireworks. I was impressed with its slickness — I can edit images straight off my web cam, thanks to Flash — right up until the point about when I tried to use it.
What’s Not Cool: What confuses me about Splashup’s tools is that they seem to be obsessed with palettes. There are no keyboard shortcuts to make up for this problem — you’re always going back and forth between image and picking tools. I wanted to stay in my image area for two seconds and get something done, but I couldn’t. Why can you not put those at the cursor? I am not sure why things do not exist at the cursor.
Also, for first-time users of such programs, the “tour” is useless, consisting only images that show features.
So? This feels like a tech demo. Abandoning MDI would have been more useful.
What’s Cool:The integration of photo sharing services was kind of unique.
What’s Not Cool: Integration doesn’t seem to be an advantage. There was no indication of what tool I was using. Also, you’d think that one of the huge advantages with working on a client server program is that your work will be saved. But not with Splashup — when I tried to close the program, a dialog box told me that all my info would be lost, which is a particularly dangerous thing. And I did lose my data two or three times; I was just adding some text, directing it around, when the background image disappeared. I tried using Undo, but it didn’t work at all. Now that is a big bug!
So? It seems that my issues are due to the underlying technology first, and then the actual design of the software second. But if I were a first-time user of image software, I might choose the free desktop device paint.net for the PC.
What’s Cool: At least it has multi-level Undo; that’s a start.
What’s Not Cool: I tried to do my Standard Test Case for image-editing software: load a picture from my digital camera, put a stupid joke caption on it, and share the results. This is by nature a trivial task; a good interface should make it feel trivial. Splashup made it easy to load my picture, but doing anything beyond that was very confusing. For instance, with the text tool, text format options appear, and seem to work when you click on them, but they don’t have any effect unless you already have text selected. Each click with the text tool created a new layer, so very soon I had accidentally created 10 extra layers containing nothing but empty text objects. I had to clear them away manually, but the layers menu made all the layers look identical, so I had to figure out by trial and error which text layer was the one containing the text I wanted to keep. Layers are a somewhat specialized feature, so software with a good learning curve would have allowed me to discover layers at my own pace once I had a need for them. But in Splashup, the layers palette, like all the tool palettes in Splashup, can’t be closed or hidden; they all just float there getting in the way of your work whether you want them or not. I didn’t need layers for my task, but Splashup forced me to learn how its layering model behaves simply in order to fix the errors that I made when trying to learn the basic interface.
The worst feature I discovered was the rotate tool. For some odd reason, rotate is a tool in the tool palette (not that you would ever guess what it does from its icon) instead of a menu command that could be applied to an image or selection. When you click on the image with this tool, it puts you into a very confusing mode: there are “Apply” and “Cancel” buttons at the top of the screen, and nothing else will work until you have clicked one of those two buttons. You can change tools while in this mode, but none of the tools will do anything to your image. If you don’t notice those two buttons (and they’re easy to miss), you’d think the program had suddenly broken. And when you’re in this mode, it’s not even clear how to do the one thing you are allowed to do, rotating the image. Clicking and dragging the image does nothing, and there are no text or graphical cues to give any indication what you’re supposed to do. I failed to figure it out myself; someone had to explain to me that you can only rotate the image by clicking and dragging a small unmarked region in the extreme corner. How did the Splashup designers expect anyone to figure this out?
So? There’s a huge need for someone to make an image-editing webapp and do it right, so I wanted to like Splashup. But I didn’t.
So? I’m a Leopard user and couldn’t use this. It’s a Leopard problem, though.
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