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General Software Discussion / Re: What makes software 'good'?
« on: May 17, 2008, 09:21 AM »
Nothing is more annoying than a program that doesn't remember your personal customizations between uses. For instance, I use one of the premier highly reliable CD/DVD burning software packages, but it's also highly aggravating because it does not remember column widths that have been set between uses.
I also think software developers should stick with the standard GUI interfaces that everyone is familiar. Software with nonstandard GUI's turns me off as it lengthens the learning curve of the software.
Software developers should also write efficient code that maximizes performance. A major complaint of mine is that the GUI's used on today's computers really hammer performance. For instance, consider a file manager that has to display thousands of files in a directory. The old DOS file managers running on a CPU clocked at 25 MHz seemed a lot faster at updating displays than today's GUI based file managers running on a CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz. Shouldn't we be seeing a leap forward in performance today over computers of the past that were running processors at 1/100 the speed?
The blame there probably lies with Microsoft and the inefficient code used in their operating systems. I think too many programmers today also think efficient code is not important since it will be run on today's fast computers. But if a program is dealing with a lot of data, the inefficient code used in the program will not go unnoticed. That would turn me off from buying any other software written by that developer.
My favorite software consists of a single executable that stores it's settings in it's own directory (not the registry), and the software is not bloated into requiring 10 times more disk space than is necessary for it's files. This also makes the software easy to uninstall with no traces left behind.
I also think software developers should stick with the standard GUI interfaces that everyone is familiar. Software with nonstandard GUI's turns me off as it lengthens the learning curve of the software.
Software developers should also write efficient code that maximizes performance. A major complaint of mine is that the GUI's used on today's computers really hammer performance. For instance, consider a file manager that has to display thousands of files in a directory. The old DOS file managers running on a CPU clocked at 25 MHz seemed a lot faster at updating displays than today's GUI based file managers running on a CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz. Shouldn't we be seeing a leap forward in performance today over computers of the past that were running processors at 1/100 the speed?
The blame there probably lies with Microsoft and the inefficient code used in their operating systems. I think too many programmers today also think efficient code is not important since it will be run on today's fast computers. But if a program is dealing with a lot of data, the inefficient code used in the program will not go unnoticed. That would turn me off from buying any other software written by that developer.
My favorite software consists of a single executable that stores it's settings in it's own directory (not the registry), and the software is not bloated into requiring 10 times more disk space than is necessary for it's files. This also makes the software easy to uninstall with no traces left behind.