John Gruber: Ronco Spray-On Usability

I’m going to be blogging some of the great articles that appeared in Joel’s nominations for best of 2004. Daring Fireball: Ronco Spray-On Usability by John Gruber is one such article. The gist of the article is that usability is, in fact, important work and not something to toss in as an afterthought. He picks on Eric Raymond’s article on Linux usability. I’ve read ESR’s article and it was interesting, but I think that Gruber is spot on when it comes to the real problem and the basic lack of a solution. I’ve had a really hard time figuring out who would actually use Yellow Dog Linux. Why would you want to replace Mac OS X, which is Unix with a solid, consistent GUI, with Linux and all of the stuff that entails?

Be sure to also read the followup.