Bloated Windows Applications
A light bulb just went on over my head. Just a little one - no cure for AIDS, no solution to the question “Why can’t we all just get along?”. But, hey, Sunday morning light-bulbs are enough of a rarity that they should be treasured, regardless of their breadth and depth.
I love the Mozilla Firefox feature where you can type search terms in the URL field and get the top-ranking page match. I hate it when the top-ranking page is a PDF - kunkle-ding, kunkle-dung, hard drive chitters away for five or six seconds, mice running madly on treadmill, while I am taunted by the Adobe splash screen. I probably say: “Wrack-a-frack-ing Adobe” twenty times a day.
I know that the app’s load time has a lot to do with it being embedded in the browser (although it’s no screamer in its native environment either). But if I take off my Engineering Groupie hat, which says: “Awww gee, that’s probably a hard problem“, and put on my User / Victim hat, I say “Too bad. It may be a hard problem, but it shouldn’t be my problem. Solve your own damn problems.”
I’m no fan of the PDF format. It’s another example that the Network Effect (where ubiquity of adoption sets the standard) is not rational. Technologies don’t become standards because of their usability or engineering merits; rather, they become standards because the company that benefits from their ubiquity is the best at hammering them into ubiquity, often through closed standards or, ahem, illegal business practices.
But today - and here’s the light bulb - it occured to me that it’s not the PDF file format that annoys me (at least not in this particular case), it’s the tool used to read that file format. It’s the ubiquitous application, the Acrobat Reader - obligatory link here - of course it’s free, duh, who would pay for it - that drives me crazy. The Reader is way too big (six seconds to load in the browser on a fast machine), has awful usability (whywhyWHY does the document magnification change when I click on the text to set cursor focus so that I can scroll with my mouse wheel?) and has a bunch of features that almost nobody ever uses (”PrintMe Internet Printing” - even the name of that “feature” is annoying) .
Bloat. Commercial Windows applications, especially from companies like Adobe and Microsoft who own ubiquitous technologies, get bigger rather than smarter. I envision product management meetings where somebody (in Carefully Crafted Casual Clothes, as opposed to bare feet, cargo pants and a Linux World tee) says “What about if we offer the ability to make toast - right from within the application? We’d capture the whole crumbs-in-the-keyboard sector!” And somebody else dreams of product sheets that say “New in 6.0 - Toast!” and somebody else is doodling a new flying toaster logo that will be rejected by Legal.
The guy in cargo pants says “Ummm, why don’t we make the toast option a plug-in”, but, since he forgot to shave that morning he is ignored. He doesn’t know The Market. He doesn’t understand the Business Case. Plug-ins are the first step towards public APIs which, lets face it, are Communism, pure and simple. And besides, he has toast crumbs in his face stubble - proof of concept.
Okay, I lied - here’s the lightbulb, the last few paragraphs were just ranting. Wait for it - that’s one of the really smart things about Unix. (Quit rolling your eyes, you bare-footed Linux crunch-heads in cargo pants.) Small pieces that do one thing really well, that seamlessly interoperate with other small pieces that do one thing really well, so that the user has as much or as little functionality as they need. In this case, a stripped-down PDF reader that loaded like lightening. If I need toast, let me invoke the toast plug-in - don’t make me invoke it if I’m not hungry. If I need PrintMe Internet Printing, let me download the extension - don’t clutter up the app with junk.
…and now that the PDF has finally loaded, I see that my search terms (I can never remember if magazine article titles are supposed to be italicized) caught a Latex user guide from a sourceforge.com project. sigh. Sunday morning.