general audience vs advanced audience

Reading Cyrille's blog entry today about Krita and GIMP appropriateness (or rather, how they are not appropriate) for a default OS installation, it got me to thinking about a common pattern we see emerge in applications.

We often end up with general audience apps that represent a good entry level position. They aren't wimps, but they certainly remain lean and the UI stays focused on what they are doing in a way that's approprirate for a general audience. They may make most people happy, particularly because the interface is nice and clean while offering the "things I want most", but they usually leave a more demanding user wanting, particularly people who are professionals in the field in question.

The professionals and enthusiasts will be looking for richer tools that Do More(tm) and often support more sophisticated models. These tools could be viewed as "upgrades" from the general audience applications except that for many people in the general audience these pro tools are vast overkill and even off putting.

The pro tools can't really be streamlined beyond a certain point without losing their audience, and the general audience tools can't be beefed up constantly without leaving behind their audience. Perhaps there is even a symbiotic relationship at play here, at least within the KDE world: the pro tools push the envelope of what's possible in ways that the general audience tools can add selections of features that straddle the general/pro audience but which are complicated to do and so more likely to show up in a pro tool in the first place; the general audience tools take the pressure off the pro tools from having to cater to too broad an audience, and the pro tools take the pressure off the general audience tools from the demands of demanding users.

(As an aside, for all the claims that one can simply have a UI adapt to the user's level of capability has never really been shown to be a real solution. I've seen it fail before, and where it has succeeded it's been for apps that themselves straddle between "general" and "advanced" in audience. Usually it just leaves a mess, and even more usually the suggestion that this is the solution comes from people who have never tried it. Aaaaanyways ..... ;)

The example of Gwenview, Digikam and Krita is a great one, I think.

With Gwenview, you get basic photo downloading from cameras and image manipulation. These "high end" (for Gwenview) features mostly comes from work laid down by the people working on the higher end photo management tools like (though not exclusively) Digikam. Sometimes feature improvements flow from the general audience app into the advanced tool app as well, but in my experience such improvements tend to be of the general audience pleasing type (as one might expect).

Meanwhile, Digikam can concentrate on being a great power tool for photographers, amateur and professional alike and Krita can concentrate on being a great power tool for artists, amateur and professional alike.

The result is a great set of apps for different audiences which help each other improve as they individually advance to better serving their specific target audience. What duplication of effort does exist is offset ten-fold by the resulting benefits for the users of each app in having something targeted to their needs. In KDE, that duplication is often very minimal.

There are other examples of this in KDE as well and they often follow very similar patterns. We have JuK and Amarok; KWrite, Kate and KDevelop; Dolphin and Konqueror ... can you think of some more?

Also, is there a pattern here that we can use when presenting our application clusters to the public?