Why is software becoming more bloated and intrusive?

When it comes to anti-viruses, I'd have to say that NOD32 is the best by far. It has a good amount of features that are all virus-scanning related, relatively small size, is extremely fast and has unparalleled reliablity and detection rates. Although the trial only lasts for 30 days, it's worth paying for imho.

Also, I hope CPUs get harder to program, like the CELL, because this will force all these lazy "time-to-market" focused developers into bankrupcy. Fact is, you can't make a working multi-threaded app if you don't code/design it well. For the rest of us that do take the time, we can be assured more sales, marketing advantages and a better product. Not only that, but assets you create on one project are far more likely to be reusable, ironically reducing development time in the long run.

 

It doesn't really need to be commented on.. but when you develop a "special adapter" for some strange reason and yet cause problems+slowdowns... that's the tip of the iceberg.

Um.. that that doesn't make sense for many levels.

Complex CPUs are still useless without a good compiler.. but that's not just it. There's more to it than what I have to say.. but in the end... a poorly written program in whatever language and whatever OS/console/CPU you use.. will still run like the poorly coded program that it is. No application is perfect, but whether conscious/unconscious decisions that are/aren't made towards good programming will affect the final product in the end.

 

Part of the problem is of course the time-to-market stuff. Another reason is that developers don't want to lose their jobs. Thus, no piece of software ever gets "done". There must always be new innovations. Of course, the first 5 or 6 revisions this is a good thing. But at some point the software truly is done. It has all the features it needs and does a good job at most stuff. At that point the company should probably shift focus to something else and all attention on this series should be bug fixes and minor maintainance. A few years down the road it could be updated again, for instance to fit a new OS, match another consumer group or something. But other than that, if you made for instance a CD burning app, you should realize at some point that all reasonable CD burning needs are covered, and there are probably other markets that would be more meaningful to explore. Convincing a company to do that seems to be tricky though. I guess the developers simply want job security and the management probably don't want to take the risk of jumping to a totally different market.

 

This thread really makes me wish Fox-it reader had a Firefox plug-in. Luckily I dont need to read pdf files that much.

 

Really? I remember they had ogl in beta stage for the version 4 back then and it ran Q2 twice as fast as windows, that was hilarious. But I also don't know if it ever made it to the public or whether it ever got out of the beta.

It's a real shame that there was so little interest in BeOS, it would have made the world a much more pleasant place to live if it ever made it into the mainstream

 

In short, more apps should be like utorrent ( http://www.utorrent.com/ ).

Totally kickass little app, in ~100k with no dependencies, and does its job perfectly.

 

If I sell you today a Burning Software that is complete and works great, with little to no bug, what will I do tomorrow ?

Because you most likely won't buy me the same software again, since you already have it...
So I need to either add features to the software I sold you to make you buy it again, or diversify and create a new software in which I have no expertise...

I think the choice is quickly made...

 

I use X-teq Setup to disable all those hundred annoying startups every application likes to use.

 

I think it's not so much that, but rather knowing when to spin off little features into full products of their own that are, of course, interoperable. This seems to be the way MS goes, and it works fairly well for them, except they try and make their products only interoperable with each other, lol.

 

FoxIt is a wonderful thing.
I've used it for a long time now, and, although it has displayed a couple of errors in the past, its speed and size more than made up for tiny issues. Plus, it had a proper [Win 'F3' style] text search function before Acrobat Reader that I found invaluable when looking up elusive jumper settings etc. in PDF motherboard manuals.

 

I just tried foxit after your recommendation but its text rendering is much worse than acrobats.

 

I hadn't noticed text rendering being of lesser quality in FoxIt than Acrobat. I must say, the tiny size and fast speed would more than make up for any slight text-rendering issues.

 

Not for me. It's true that Foxit has lower quality font rendering, at least for now. It doesn't seem to do gamma-correct downsampling, and it has an annoying tendency to start characters on half-pixel offsets vertically which means characters with a horizontal line at the top like ERTZPDFCB look poor. While the startup time of Acrobat Reader is annoying even with half of it already preloaded, Text readability is the main criterion in my eyes.

 

Whereas, retrieving info quickly from the files has always been my only use of a PDF reader.
I guess that's the two main camps summed up.

 

My first pick for the bloatware award: Microsoft Office 2003. I find it completely impossible to create any document with that without spending more than half an hour turning off all the extremely irritating crap. And many of those things are impossible to disable...

Last week, I made a schematic in Visio 2003 for the first time. I rather liked Visio in the past, but this time I came close to thowing my laptop out of the window a few times. Like, you put two objects next to each other, and draw a straight line between them.

Not so! It turns it into an 'S' shape by default. And when you try to drag the line segments into a straight line, just before it becomes straigh, the line segment JUMPS OVER. There is often NO WAY AT ALL to get it into a straight line!!! GRRRR.

Bloatware? Frustrationware is more like it.

 

You can have a fully working compiler in only a few kilobytes, complete with extra organization features.
Eclipse weighs in at over 100 Megabytes compressed.
Microsoft's Visual Studio pushes....I think 5GB.

BTW, despite being so bloated, Windows is actually just about the fastest OS when it comes to running programs. (though the reason for that is things other than how bloated or not bloated an OS is, but Windows can often substantially outperform linux)

 

You're using the wrong tool. Use the "line tool" to connect the two objects rather than the "connector tool". The "line tool" is on the drawing toolbar. Seem to work fine on my copy of Office 2003.

 

IMHO the current Windows kernel is actually a pretty good piece of engineering and it's fairly well thought out.

 

really? hmm, i've never really wished for more document types to be opened in my browser. seems more secure and plenty efficient to have image files open in small image viewer (irfanview), media files open in small media viewer (vlc), flash files open in standalone flash player, pdfs open in small pdf viewer... but i guess i'm weird. this, however, also explains why i'm usually in the "speed of opening" vs. "quality of text rendering" camp. When I want to get into serious editing or even serious viewing, great, bring on the pshop CS2, or openoffice or acrobat. but 99% of the time, I want to scan documents first, and so I want them to open in a separate, but small, viewer.

I think, however, that this phenomenon is not so unique, and seems as much a symptom of weak consumers, as bad programming. Joe average seems to want everything "turnkey". They want "turnkey business", so people sell them a franchise and markup included training, equipment, and marketing 20%... they want a "car with everything" so you get a shoddy PC built-into your ride, markup: 75%... they want a phone that does "everything", so you get half a dozen apps built in, lacking the memory to make most of them useful, and a camera that only takes pictures outdoors, markup 50%... or if the markup isn't extreme, it's because they're selling you inferior components. It's not to say that all progress is worthless! cameraphones CAN be neat, car pc's are great, an OS with built in apps is a nice timesaver for the uninitiated. But... seems like people could always benefit from seeking out more knowledge. It's fun, they keep forgetting that! ^^;

Really, we're the ones benefitting... Diplo's no fool, he knows where to find tiny freeware apps! The pain for us isn't seeing Nero do so many things, it's that as recently as version 6 it was still a decent app... it was our friend..! Sadly, like all friends, we have to let them go! Sure, we'll miss our famous pals, but they are out to rake in the Big Bucks now and we need to find some more good ol boys to chill with again... :S i'm going to cry! T_T

 

I have to agree Foxit's font readering leaves more to be desired but it is small, light and extremely fast and so it works for me.

I got an nLite session from a dude at msfn who says he got it down to 86 MB!!! If anyone is interested PM me. I havent used it myself. I am waiting to get a copy of XP Pro to try it out on.

Perhaps we should have a thread and have it stickied that happen to be the most efficient, small, quick apps that people can use. That would be helpful for a lot of us.