mplayer. Omnivorous. Plays video on anything with SVGA, 500mhz Pentium 3 and 256 mb of RAM. Nice config files. Nice CLI options. Encodes/decodes video. Can be wrapped in nice GUI for MacOS X, KDE, GNOME, Windows etc. Opensource.
BBEdit. Straitforward text editor, search and replace window built for GREP usage, minimalistic syntax hilite (I do not like angry fruit salad of TextMate and Eclipse). Universal Binary (which is, in fact, two binaries folled in single package for PPC and x86) is just 32 mb. Exists since cromagnon people riding mamoths with their old Macs.
(Total|Windows) Commander was good before they started stuffing it with graphic thumbnails and all the crap.
âUltraEdit has been able to continuously upgrade itself without
becoming bloated or unusable. They seem to have got it right. I
canât imagine being a developer without it.â
Youâre not serious, are you? It has a built-in IE rendering feature now. It has a built-in SSH/Telnet client now. Whatâs really the big deal about having a browser or a SSH client open? Do it all without ever leaving your editor! It takes longer to load with each new release. No thanks. I have been a long-time fan of UE, but itâs becoming the next emacs in a big hurry. Iâm pretty sure Ian Mead was never a Unix type â the âdo one thing and do it wellâ philosophy is getting further and further removed from UE.
Then again, thereâs always exceptions to every rule⌠Emacs â itâs a great operating system, all it needs is a decent text editor.
âOSS software certainly seems much more resistant to spoilage based on what Iâve seen.â -Jeff
I think one part of this may be because many of the popular OSS are developed by a smaller set of developers in their spare time. As such, they do not have a marketing and design team requiring them to implement 8 new features in record time to hit a release date, instead of implementing 2 new features and optimizing 2 existing ones and releasing whenever they feel like. They just donât have enough funding to spoil the software
Have you ever looked at source code that has been released to the market for more than a decade?
I have. And itâs not pretty. New code is fresh, very easy to understand, straight-forward and obvious, etc. Old code has a lot of twisty/tricky hacks, handling of 999 corner cases, and begins to look like spaghetti-like.
âThe other source of new features are the customers themselves. A day doesnât go by without hearing one of the following lines âThis program would be perfect if you only addedâŚâ or âThe ??? diagram is the industry standardâ or âYou really need to import/export the ??? data formatâ.â -MRW
Very true. I get tons of e-mails for Paint.NET asking for all sorts of features, changes, and file format support. Sorry, no, I will not be adding PDF or SVG support⌠sorry, not planning to add some kind of wizard for adding picture frame borders ⌠sorry, not planning to add a gallery browser (Microsoft already spent millions to write this thing called âWindows Explorerâ, why not just use that?), sorry, not planning to add features into Paint.NET that Vista already has (but that XP doesnât), etc. etc.
Right now Iâm much more interested when I get an e-mail from someone asking âWhy canât Paint.NET do X?â when X is a feature thatâs already there. E-mails like that are votes toward simplifying the discoverability of that feature.
This is not a new phenomenon at all. The first article I read about this was in PC Week or Byte back in the mid 80âs. I think it was Dvorak, butit could have been someone else. This was the first time Iâd ever heard the term âslugs factor,â and it definitely resonated with me â even at that time, when a 10 MHz 80286 was smoking hot! Todayâs PCs are about 50 times faster, with multiple processors, and more RAM than hard drives had back then, and weâre still talking about this same thing.
New law for consideration â Software guys will ALWAYS be able to waste what the hardware guys provide.
To echo an earlier post - HP is THE WORST. Install a printer driver, and look at the process table some time. Itâs ridiculous.
This is so true, itâs sooo annoying when programs have totally useless features. Acdsee ruined it when they started supporting videos, same way did go Winamp.
Why doesnât programs do what they are designed to do, and only that. Every program doesnât have to be a huge multimedia application.
The Google homepage hasnât spoiled, if you can consider that an application. If you can keep your interface simple then you can make the application as complicated as you like.
It has been commented on before, but I am a bit surprised you didnât mention Media Player Classic. Itâs interesting for two reasons. First off, the program is stable, and development is frozen. It hasnât been updated in the past year and a half, but noone cares because it performs its basic role of playing directshow filters correctly.
Second, and more importantly, it seems like MPC was designed with Software Spoiling in mind. Itâs a reaction to the spoiling of Windows Media Player.
âThis multimedia DirectShow player looks like the old Windows Media Player 6.4, but has a lot more features like switching audio streams in an MP4 file.â
Hardware drivers become more and more bloated too, every external piece of hardware i own comes with an installation cd of useless software.
Scanner - To install drivers you also have to install custom scanning software, editing
Printer - Same as scanner
Mp3 player - A few separate programs to sync the thing, format it, create playlists and the such.
Creative did the right thing with live, offering a âjust install the driversâ option on their download, i wish they would do it with their mp3 players too.
Notepad doesnât suffer from bloat
If you are tired of winamp bloat, just buy a new fridge.
Emacs â itâs a great operating system, all it needs is a decent text editor.
Snagit. Holy fuck, snagit developers. Put down the compiler and step away from the computer.
Itâs funny because itâs ALL true.
With closed, âsecret sauceâ software, the producers of the application do not have goals in line with the goals of the customers. One wants to fix a problem, one wants to sell stuff. With open software, both have the same goal, fix the problem.
An interesting observation. It does seem that the commercialization of software presents some inherent problems, and one of those problems is definitely manifested in the bloat/spoilage over time.
the future of software is specialized apps.
I think thereâs some truth here as well. If most apps become web apps, then distribution is no longer a problem, and this opens the door to the âlong tailâ of highly specialized applications⌠maybe the âdo everythingâ suite is no longer necessary?
Software guys will ALWAYS be able to waste what the hardware guys provide.
Yes, but there are some bits of software that manage to waste that hardware power in USEFUL ways over their lifetime. Most donât. How do you walk this line? It sounds like a robust plugin ecosystem is the right way for most apps.
I canât believe no one mentioned the poster child for software bloat: Quicken. This one useful program is now so bloated you canât do anything without 36 screen refreshes. And Iâm caught in the endless cycle of buying a new version hoping they FIXED the damn thig, only to sink further into the abyss. I think it peaked 10 years ago.
Very very interesting point, Jeff.
These days I am having some problems with a spanish software used to design photographic albums (http://www.fotoprix.com/album_fotos_digital/). You can make an album with your digital photos, and you can print it later in the shop.
With the version 1.XX, the size of an album of about 40 pages was less than 400MB, and could be copied into a CD-ROM, then sent to the shop. Now, with the version 2.0, the size of a project of 14 pages is 800MB! I donât want to imagine a 40-page album!
I wonder how they decided to release this 2.0 version. For me, as software developer, itâs a shoddy work, and should have never be released.
What do you do then, when your company writes only one piece of software, and that software is as good as perfect? I think many companies find it easier to just add features and features because they think it is to risky to start working on an entirely new project.
Also, I would like to nominate vim, it has been around for a long time (at least when you also count vi), and it still is faster than I am. One of the advantages it has that protects it from spoil is that there is no GUI. There are noe big menus getting crowded, just more keyboard-commands to learn, and you only bother learing those that are necessary for you.
