alt Hacker NewsHave you seen any specialized software, e.g. AutoCAD by Autodesk?
In the top ribbon menu there are icons only. And not any familiar ones at all.
Icons, text representations of the action behind the menu items…
It's a designer hell in which you have no chance to please everyone. Like someone using a vim editor for 20 years... some people are using icons, other want text and the third group wants combination of both.
Autocad (and most other professional design software) is like that because the vast majority of people that learn how to use it will do so whether they like it or not, because it’s a professional or school requirement. It sucks for beginners but if you’re using the software day in and day out for a few weeks, you’ll learn them, and then pick up the CLI commands for your most frequently used commands. After that, you’d be loath to give to give up the screen real estate for text labels.
These are technical programs for technical work performed by trained technical people. They have different workflows, goals, mindsets and ways of reasoning about things than developers do, and that’s fine.
A lot of shade gets thrown at nontechnical software users for not grasping things developers find intuitive. Yet, when many of those same people throwing that shade encounter a technical environment they can’t grasp immediately, it’s the interface's fault.