Sometimes when I’m bored, I do vanity searches for jUploadr. Usually, I find people saying the same thing: “It’s great”, “It’s easy to use”, “It’s better than the actual Flickr uploadr”, etc. However the last time I searched, I found this, which is a huge pan.
Funny thing is, the guy harps on it being written in Java like he’s some uber geek, and then goes on to complain that it doesn’t support adding to sets or tagging photos. He also complains that jUploadr “expects me to go into preferences and set them (tags)”, then he criticizes it for not being ‘intuitive’.
You know, if you’re going to write a snarky post like that, you might want to actually be *right* first. Over 8000 people have downloaded jUploadr, and everyone else seems to be able to edit tags on photos. How are they accomplishing this complex act? By double-clicking the photo. Is it not intuitive to double-click things? Not to Mr. Techie. Did he just drop his photos into jUploadr, say “this sucks” and close it? It’s not like you have to do some strange incantation to access these supposedly missing features, after all they are clearly shown on jUploadr’s screenshots page. What’s irritating is he was having problems, but rather than sending me an email or posting on jUploadr’s blog, or doing anything productive, he just writes a sarcastic i-am-so-smart blog post and is done with the whole thing.
Look, you can complain that jUploadr isn’t exactly like the Flickr uploadr, but when I wrote it, I hadn’t even seen the their uploader, and now that I have, I’m glad I didn’t replicate its design, which isn’t nearly as powerful as jUploadr’s. Even the Flickr admins steer people toward jUploadr when the default uploader fails them. Do you think they’d do this if jUploadr wasn’t intuitive?
So, my techie self, in the future before writing a snippy little post about how some software fails you, perhaps you should actually check some documentation, or send out an email or *something*, because it’s clear that even my technophobic mom is well ahead of you in technical ability. At least she can double-click.
And *that’s* how to write a snarky post.
September 10th, 2006 at 9:51 am
Scohen,
I am the one who wrote it. First of all thank you for porting the uploader to Ubuntu. Its better than not having anything at all. I have seen the alternatives and they are not even close.
As for my being snarky - touche!
Allow me an ounce of explanation. You see i am treating this migration as a Windows vs. Linux (more specifically Ubuntu) kind of a thing. I am trying to see it from the point of view of someone who isnt very techie and is trying to make the move. You see this person will have been using Windows for years! For him, its like second nature. While i know Linux introduces a fresh change, unfortunately, this change is not enjoyable. As a matter of fact its downright painful .. especially if you’ve not done a lot of command-line work before. So sometime i let my wife do the stuff i need. And whatever she cant figure out on her own, i crib about. This gives me an idea on the intuitiveness of the software i am looking at.
So one suggestion for you is to make a package out of it. This will let you deliver updates to users automatically, plus free the users from sorting out dependencies on their own. In GUI, having a menu item created by a newly installed software is an assumed thing you know
A one little correction. The software did not fail me. I used the windows version and the j-version did not act/behave the same. Thats all
Anyway, thanks for the wonderful work. Without jUploader, i would have been using the flickr uploader form (ughhh .. perish the though).
- My Techie Self.
September 11th, 2006 at 6:06 am
What a civil exchange of views and opinions. I wish we could agree and disagree this way on all issues. I hope Radar reads this.
DAD