Uh, can you say that in English?

I'm participating in an open source project at the moment, a cool new server called "Red 5", something I may have mentioned previously. In particular, I'm am tasked at the moment with translating the geek speak of the developers into usable english and examples for the not so technically versed. But more than anything, I quite glad that this project sees the need for it on their website currently being developed.

More than anything, in my opinion, one of the many shortcomings of opensource and a large part of the tech world is the assumption that everything must be in geek. The reasons for the obscurity of many excellent open source projects is simply that they have no interest or to be fair volunteers who decide to help out with building an informative and user friendly website around their software product, and quite frankly, that's what it is, a product. More often than not, those websites look like after thoughts and when they are developed, they look like they were made by the geek who wrote said software who is content to type along all day on a linux box.

One of the advantages of being symmetrically brained (a new term I'm coining, go with me for the moment) is that while I am a techie in all senses of the word, I have a fully developed and active artistic side and can appreciate why Apple spends all their time simplifying everything for the end user. I like simple. I would pay for simple. There is enough complexity in this business with the alphabet soup of abbreviations, terms, protocols etc that are being develped on a daily basis that when I happen on a website that puts things in simple terms it is an amazing breath of fresh air.

There is then the question of why there is a lack of visual/user interface designers in the open source world. Even the opensource graphics software tend to sport terrible interfaces. Is it that they are not invited to participate on open source projects or is there more complexity. - a topic for my next post. Definitely something I should look into.

For the moment, catching up on blogs that rock,I caught the podcast of Jason Kottke (kottke.org) and Heather B. Armstrong ( Dooce.com) at South by Southwest today. Interesting insights.

Also, the podcast of Jim Coudal and Jason Fried of Coudal Partners and 37signals fame.

To be continued..