(Locked) Adobe Muse

omarabid said
Quoting a good comment from Hacker News

Good article, except for this minor point:

Certain kinds of human creativity and expertise cannot be reproduced by machines. … music can never be the Eroica or “This Land is Your Land,” because there is no algorithm with the creative and life experience of Beethoven or Woody Guthrie.

Of course, I agree with the practical point where no current machine can do human art. Because of that we can’t currently automatically extract the semantics of an image, or even convert a post-script document into clean HTML . So, it doesn’t affect the conclusion in the foreseeable future. But one can’t seriously believe there’s no algorithm behind an artist’s art without believing in some kind of ghost controlling her brain, and that ghost somehow doesn’t run an algorithm. As far as I know, there is no such ghost. It very much looks like our cognition (including our art), is entirely the product of physical processes, even though it definitely doesn’t feel like it.

Now, I reckon art is not just the product of some internal algorithm, running in isolation from the rest of the world. We’re highly interactive beings, and our output mostly depend on our input. But there is some kind of algorithm which does all these interactions, though it is likely incredibly complex.

My point is, I wouldn’t loose hope of automating something that currently, only humans can do. Take spam filters, for example. With very little knowledge, they can take out spam with stunning accuracy. But if no-one told me about Bayesian filters, I would likely try to make the computer parse the whole e-mail like a human, then give up, thinking that only humans can understand those e-mails well enough to filter them (note my mistaken assumption that the spam filter somehow must acquire some high-level understanding of the e-mail to do its job).

Certainly, Muse is far from being a designer, but it’s a step in the right direction. Do you care about food if it’s delivered by a human or a machine. No. Because the end result is the same. Adobe doesn’t match a designer, but can at least satisfy a good number of user for the moment.

This isn’t delivered by a machine. It’s made by a machine. And yes, I do prefer my food being made by a human being rather than a machine.

AlexPascal said
This isn’t delivered by a machine. It’s made by a machine. And yes, I do prefer my food being made by a human being rather than a machine.

I do too – I’d also prefer that human be well paid and taken care of.

Most typical print designers are afraid of code – it is NOT poetry to a typical right brained designer.

As a designer, there’s nothing more distressing than have a developer code a site you’ve crafted and it ends up looking horrid (because the developer hasn’t got an eye for design and lacks the skillset to adjust his template) (This is a generalization – there are some seriously awesome developers around).

Muse might mean bloated code, but it’s more designer friendly than Dreamweaver to a typical Adobe CS print designer.

Their code is so messed up!

WillemoesDK said

omarabid said
I never knew that a user sees the markup and actually not design. Come on guys! Good markup is good if you are going to edit the template by hand, it’s a must. However, sites built with Muse will be edited with Muse. It works, it produces over the average sites. They are not quite good, but they work and they are over the average.

You have TOTALLY missed the point about why it’s so damn important to produce great looking semantic code.

So. If you need a guy to repair you car, would you then like him to use ducktape and glue to fix the engine? Come on? No problem.. No ordinary person should look at the engine anyways? right? And it’s working? right?

See the problem?

Old thread.