Free software scares normal people

People want features, and they're willing to learn complicated UIs to get them. A software that has hyper simplified options has a very limited audience. Take his example: we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file, yet whose understanding of video amounts to wanting it to be "normal" so they can play it. For such a person, there are two paths: become familiar enough with video formats that you understand exactly what you want, and correspondingly can manipulate a tool like handbrake to get it, or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works. A software that appeals to the weird purgatory in the middle necessarily has a very limited audience. In practice, this small audience is served by websites. Someone searches "convert x to y" and a website comes up that does the conversion. Knowing some specialized software that does that task (and only that one narrow task) puts you so far into the domain of the specialist that you can manage to figure out a specialist tool.

For this example:

> we have somebody who has somehow obtained a "weird" video file

Why are you arriving at the conclusion that this requires complex software, rather than just a simple UI that says "Drop video file here" and "Fix It" below? E.g., instead of your conclusion "stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works", another possibility is the simple UI I described? That seemed to me the point of the post.

The issue is that downloading a software, for most people, implies an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task. If I'm going out of my way to download something, then I'm probably willing to learn a few knobs that give me more control. Hence why I suggested that such a person would rather use a website.

This is really just my read for why this sort of software isn't more common. Go ahead and make it, and if it ends up being popular I'll look the fool.

> an investment in the task the software does that is unlikely to be paid off if it only does a single simple task

I don't think that's true at all. The tool linked here is exactly the kind of utility that does one single task and that people are happy to download. Most people use software to solve a problem, not to play around with it and figure out if they have a use for it.

Conversely, people want familiar UIs that they’re familiar with, and are willing to forgo features to use them.

The walled gardens got a lot more appealing.

When we moved to Canada from the UK in 2010 there was no real way to access BBC content in a timely manner. My dad learned how to use a VPN and Handbrake to rip BBC iPlayer content and encode it for use on an Apple TV.

You had to do this if you wanted to access the content. The market did not provide any alternative.

Nowadays BBC have a BritBox subscription service. As someone in this middle space, my dad promptly bought a subscription and probably has never fired up Handbrake since.

I like the OBS software. Complex at first yes. But it has a magic solution: great one pager to get you started. Follow it and you are recording within a few seconds!

> or stick to your walled-garden-padded-room reality where somebody else gives you a video file that works.

That’s not always a possibility. See for example:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21262302/ap-test-fail-iph...

Those people didn’t need or want Photoshop or a complicated program with tons of options to convert image formats form anything to anything. Even a simpler app like Preview implies knowing where to look for the conversion part and which format to pick. They could have done instead with a simple window which said “Drop File Here”, and if it’s an HEIC, convert to JPEG. Could even have an option to delete the original, but that’s bout it.

There’s an Alfred workflow which is basically that. It does have some configuration, but the defaults are sensible and doesn’t let you screw up the important part of “detect this format which is causing me trouble and produce a format which will work”

https://alfred.app/workflows/alfredapp/heic-to-jpeg/

> They could have done instead with a simple window which said “Drop File Here”, and if it’s an HEIC, convert to JPEG

But then you have to remember the names of 200 distinct software that all do this one thing, so you make a meta-software to manage and organize them, and you're back to square one only with more indirection

> That’s not always a possibility.

The solution in such cases can't reasonably be "everybody around the world learns to download one particular tool to fix things". In your example, the two reasonable solutions are either apple figures out how not to send image files to people that they can't understand, or the college board figures out how to convert heic into jpeg themselves. Otherwise, as in that case, most people will simply be left in a lurch.

No, of course not. The point is that in the meantime (the problem was eventually solved) such a tool bridges the gap.

LLM's exist now.

Google could do this years ago.

It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it, but you'll find the solution quickly because many other people also experience the problem.

The people with the know how to use such a tool are more likely to use a swiss army knife tool than a specialized one off tool. The article mentions someone using windows photo viewer to do the conversion.

> It might be a problem that you have to search for the solution to every time you have it,

as you say, it is a problem, and for many people an unacceptable tradeoff