ACDSee used to be so fast, that’s why I used now, it is just sucks. Image editing tools, etc.
Nero has to take the cake though for worst feature. A recent version included…A VOIP client. I’ve been requesting that for years for my burner software.
I think it stems from a problem of commercial software in general and how your typical company hiring typical developers operate. I firmly believe that a small team of developers can really build great software (great = efficient, and valuable).
Without sounding cliche’ Have the problem that Microsoft faces with their bloatware is because they do listen to every person on the planet. The most destructive feature is “help microsoft track how you use your program anonymously”.
To me, no respectable power-user ever turns this on. Just your typical low-end user. So what do you get. Software build by survey that has silly features in it that no advanced user really enjoys.
But then again, it’s quite common for the Windows ‘ecosystem’, by definition it caters to the the common denominator.
Incorporating more and more features must not be bad in every way.
You need only 10% of the features, and so does nearly everybody.
But every needs other 10%.
With Office 2007 Microsoft tried to get things in balance between accessibility and feature-completeness - i think they did it very well for a first shot in this direction.
Of course all old users are complaining, but in the long run, it’s the way to go.
I don’t know if anyone mentioned it, I only skimmed the comments, but a related annoyance is programs that lock out old versions, or force the upgrade. I always wait as long as possible to upgrade but recently I’ve been “forced” to give up functioning versions of MSN, Yahoo messenger, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, yahoo photos and probably others. Trading them in for bulkier and buggier versions in most cases.
In my view, the solution not only lies in plugins but in packages of plugins. I’m thinking about Eclipse, Firefox and LINUX package managers like apt-get.
Dependancies can be a pain to manage when the plugin system isn’t mature enough and it may take some time to setup your software to your liking, but my guess is these issue can be solved with mature technology.
Imagine sharing configuration profiles instead of downloading and installing software…
It’s driven by marketing. New features sell. Performance enhancements don’t.
A brighter set of marketing “professionals” might figure out that adding new features isn’t necessarily desirable, and that selling a suite of smaller, simpler targeted applications (or features) might just generate a more consistent revenue stream, particularly if enhancements to these applications are added only after rational, quantitative market research and an excruciating amount of testing.
But we’re talking about marketing here. What are the odds?
An example where the user himself spoils a software is Mozilla Firefox.
It works great when its vanilla. But as and when you start adding extensions, it starts to affect its performance. In this particular case, it is the combined sin of the extension developers (which apart from having the features that they are supposed to have, also have some that are not used much), and the user. Oops! did I call myself a user? OK. I mean the customer.
The collective in-efficiencies of the individual extensions and the greed of the customer to have all that he can, is what makes Firefox (mind that capital ‘F’) a spoilt kid.
The fix for that is in our hands. Choose your extensions wisely!
I too was a big Paint Shop Pro user throughout the 90s, but I switched to Fireworks around 2000. Unfortunately, Fireworks is now suffering the same fate - the last three releases have each doubled in size.
Winzip actually improved. The older versions had an annoying feature where if you opened a new instance, it popped up a message asking you if you’re sure to open a new instance because one is already open. It’s gone with v11.
The classic behaviour of right clicking and creating a new zip or doubleclicking a zip to extract it is still there. Now it handles rar files too so one doesn’t need to have a copy of winrar. It’s still Although I prefer to handle rar files with winrar myself. Winzip is still fast.
I loved paint shop pro version 7. Then with 8 they tried to make it a photo editing tool (to appeal to a completely different audience) , which completely and utterly ruined it as a tool to create bitmaps.
I tried version 10 as a trial… and hated it also. So when corel took over… they kept the photo editing direction.
I’ve used Paint Shop Pro 4.12 forever, well at least for the last 10 years. The last time I thought I might upgrade was around 8.0 and it was horribly slow and unusable.
I make a distinction between feature-creep (It slices! It dices! But wait, there’s more!) and increasingly fine levels of control and precision without sacrificing simplicity. Two products that I think display the later are :
HP software anyone? Actually I can’t think of a time that HP wasn’t bloating software. Just last night I was working on a computer and opened the task manager to see EIGHT HP processes running. Any development team that sits back and decides it’s okay to chew through the user’s processor with EIGHT running processes while the user isn’t even using the product should be beaten with large, wet cats.
All of the above also applies to Norton, hence my switch to Avast, which still annoys me on occasion because it runs something like 3-4 processes itself, but at least they seem to be fairly lightweight.
The only apps I still use that have never spoiled are vim and mIRC. AppRocket is another one, but I’ve recently replaced it with Launchy to get… more features.
The original MPC project is basically dead, look into MPC update (guliverkli2) and home cinema (mpc-hc).
MPC is a great example of this almost entirly because it IS dead. The version of it I use is from 2005, but as far as I can tell it’s completly bug free, and has every feature I could possible want in a lightweight media player. What is there to update without going down the path of spoiling it?
