Who writes good, stable, easy-to-use software?

[dawg]

Not Apple. iTunes is a beast.
Not Intuit. QuickBooks is the Antichrist.
Symantec? Surely you jest.
Microsoft? ........


Who do you think does a good job of writing stable, functional, easy-to-use software?
(Something that does it's job. Don't much care what it is.)

[limpyhobbler]

1. Google Chrome browser, who makes that?, Google I guess...

[dawg]

2. I've never had any problems with Google.

Good call.

[rawtribe]

3. .

10 print "Hello"
20 goto 10

[dawg]

6. Line 10 is supposed to be print "Penus"

It is Gob's program from Arrested Development.

And it was stable, functional, and easy-to-use.

[BootinUp]

4. It probably depends on the stage of maturity a company has reached

Companies that are at a point where quality is very important to growing or sustaining their business do a better job quality wise. There comes a point where a company uses its market leverage to increase sales and quality becomes less important to their success. (short term anyways). Thats my quick take.

[Ptah]

5. SOLIDWORKS, AutoCad, GibbsCAM are three than have been useful for me for years

3-D modeling, Engineering Drawings and CNC code generation.

[The Straight Story]

7. Open source community (nt)

[hunter]

17. I like gimp.

Arcane doesn't make me uncomfortable. And gimp is FREE.

http://www.gimp.org

Gimp is an evolved thing, I find it more intuitive than Photoshop. Photoshop feels too rigid.

And Photoshop is EXPENSIVE. The ordinary version is too expensive for casual use, ($699) and the less expensive versions are crippled to the extent that gimp (did I mention gimp is FREE?) is a very reasonable alternative.

When it comes to plugin development the internal structure of Adobe's Photoshop is beyond arcane, it's absolutely byzantine and even more twisted than it's codependent/competitor Microsoft's software products.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/photoshop.html

Of course it depends upon what you are familiar with, and what you expect the software to do. Commercial Media companies and photographers use Photoshop. The end.

It's all baby duck syndrome anyways. The first real operating system I used (as opposed to Atari DOS and things like that) was BSD Unix. I've still got a few of my original bound manuals from the UC computer labs. I feel at home in Linux. Popping up a terminal and installing some cool software from the repositories always makes me happy. No credit cards, no registrations or activations, none of that nonsense.

[hunter]

20. Things we buy generally cost less to make than what we pay for them.

That's how capitalism works.

Photoshop is not worth $699 dollars to me so I don't use it.

I'm pretty sure Adobe spends more on marketing than they do on software development and I've no reason to support that nonsense.

Then again, look at me. I drive a car made in 1984 and generally acquire my computers by diverting them from the dumpsters.

Human technical progress would have a vastly different nature if most people were like me...

In my futuristic utopia you can grow anything you like in your garden. Clothing, hamburgers, bicycles, medicines, cell phones, supercomputers... who knows, maybe even space ships. All you have to do is ask around, someone will have the seeds.

[ironflange]

21. I agree

Gimp is the only thing I use; I see nothing arcane at all in it. Sounds like someone has an axe to grind.

[truedelphi]

33. I just found out about GIMP tlast week and would love it

If you would say a bit more.

I am going to download it tomorrow or Tues, and then I have heard I can put our Photoshop plug ins into it as well.

[hunter]

36. Start with the Gimp tutorials...

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials

It's easier to learn gimp from scratch than translate from the photoshop way of doing things.

If you know how to do something complex in Photoshop and want to do it in Gimp, it'll sometimes make you crazy. Same thing going from Gimp to Photoshop. I like all the multiple windows of Gimp, some prefer the monolith of Photoshop.

Things that are must-have add-ons for gimp are FX-Foundry, Liquid Rescale, and G'MIC.



pocahontas = avatar

Gimp ≠ Photoshop

(Colors twisted by Gimp)

[truedelphi]

37. Thanks for making those distinctions.

It was great to know about those things.

Tomorrow will be install day for gimp - can I pester you PM style if I get stuck? (I promise I will go through the tutorials for Gimp first.)

[Taverner]

8. Canonical's Ubuntu

[alphafemale]

11. I love Ubuntu. nt

[Taverner]

13. Best. Linux. Distro. Ever.

[JCMach1]

23. +1, Ubuntu

[Spider Jerusalem]

30. They've done a good job of packaging it anyway

writing it, I'm not so sure (Unity is supposedly easy to use; I don't like it...or Gnome 3; I use KDE).

[Taverner]

31. Have you heard of Kubuntu?

It's Ubuntu with KDE instead of gnome

[Spider Jerusalem]

34. That's what I use

KDE 4.7 is quite nice, and I find it much preferable to most of the other Linux desktop environments I've tried (it gets knocked for being a resource hog but it seems to use less memory than Windows to run similar applications...)

[HopeHoops]

10. That went out of style 40 years ago.

On Edit: I haven't met a single programmer under 35 who even knows what the fuck a flowchart is.

[HopeHoops]

15. How OLD are you? I still flowchart critical components.

Yeah, the GUI tools are great, but they tend to open up sloppy code just because it "works" on the expected path. A flowchart makes you think about ALL of the conditions you could encounter. Yes, it takes time, but it saves far more in the debugging stage (which may not exist with a well-created flowchart).

[HopeHoops]

24. It really depends on the nature of the code. There are things you can code with your eyes closed.

Well, not literally, but I trust you know what I mean. I still lay out database schemas on paper and play with variations before even touching the keyboard. It's a lot easier to scribble things out and write tiny notes in the margins than it is to rework it on screen. That, and flowcharting, make it much simpler to just fire in the most important parts of the structure.

To be fair though, code is like a work of fiction - you've got the entire thing in your head. I see it more in the sense of a circuit diagram. I'm not going to touch the soldering iron until I've laid out the structure and run the calculations for the component values. The other value is communicating the core structure to other developers. It saves a lot of time if they can review the diagrams and get a basic understanding before you talk rather than spending two hours just trying to explain it. Sure, I can pick up and/or recreate old, even ancient, code I wrote with relative ease, but even the best in-line documentation won't provide an overall picture.

As for the edge cases, no matter how good you are or what method you use, there's always going to be another one.

Damn. Now I've got Monty Python's "Spanish Inquisition" skits stuck in my head. I'm not sure why, but something about that triggered it. Bother. It's too early in the morning for that.

[HopeHoops]

27. How about anything M$?

That shit's ALL too big. I have M$ Office but rarely use it. Open Office is seamless between Win, Mac and Linux and does a better job of opening older M$ files than M$ products do. I've written volumes of technical documentation and nobody bothers to read it. I guess that's why I prefer graphic (chart) representations with inline documentation.

On a somewhat related note, I worked at a place over 10 years ago where an idiot who lived on trendy magazines and porn somehow was in charge of market development. He gave a presentation (PowerPoint, of course) that showed every module going through CORBA to get to EVERY OTHER module - not as a cloud, but as multiple CORBA boxes - inherent failure to grasp the concept. When he was called out on it, his excuse was that the chart was just the "marketecture".

And yes, "snoop -p" is a great way to find out who is hogging the net and what they're downloading. It was always obvious when he was in the office.

As for the middle of the night thing, I always keep a steno pad by the bed with a pen hooked in the spiral so I can jot down shit while it is fresh in my mind. Sometimes it is brilliant - other times it reads like "corn fluff iron compost radio". It's a toss-up, but I can usually go back to sleep after writing it down.

[HopeHoops]

29. Oh yeah. I've got some good ones, but I'm saving them for a book I'm working on.

Actually, it is a trilogy spanning 180 years (starting around 1930) and it's really only the 1980/1990s period that I need the band names for. Some of them are really sick. I've only been working on it for 20 years. It mixes real events with fictional ones so I sort of have to redo the section on N. Korea blowing itself up about ten years ago. (sigh).

And yes, any *real* developer knows M$ code sucks. It's got more holes than Swiss cheese in a tank full of mice. That said, Win7 is the closest thing to a stable operating system since NT4SP6 and prior to that, Win98SE.

[Taverner]

14. Every manager I have ever had ran meetings and projects in flowchart form

And I was first exposed to flowcharts as a 10 year old

That being said, I prefer to work in bullet points and subheadings

[hobbit709]

19. Depends on the application.

When I find something that works, i pretty much stay with it.
I have a couple of apps that were originally for Win98 and still work just fine on Win 7.

[HopeHoops]

25. They've tried to kill off MFC, but it still works in Win 7.

Although I have to admit that I actually like C#. I was a hold-out for a long time, but it does take a lot of the burden (especially memory management) off of the code and lets the main library handle such things. I haven't found the overhead to be even a minor issue. And this is coming from someone who used to count clock cycles in machine code. (sigh)

[jmowreader]

22. ECRM

It's a company that makes computer-to-plate systems for printing plants. The software that drives their platesetters (it's called CTServer) has gone down exactly one time in the two years I've been working here, and it wouldn't have then except some dumbass got drunk, ran his car into the substation feeding this area, and darkened 150 blocks.

I can give you the name of a company that writes bad, unstable, hard-to-use software if you want that...

[truedelphi]

32. If my memory serves me today --

There used to be a company called PFS. They wrote $ 99 programs back in the mid eighties. You could buy a
little $ 99 word processing tool, and a $ 99 accounting package, and you didn't end up having to spend two months to master the basics of Word, or two months attempting to learn the sketchiest basics of Excel, but sit down and in ninety minutes, you knew the programs.

I don't know if they' re around any more.

[Moondog]

35. No one. n/t

[Glassunion]

38. Commodore BASIC

[hunter]

39. Frank Ostrowski's Turbo-Basic XL for the 8-bit Atari was my favorite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo-BASIC_XL



That and Clinton Parker's Action! which is a structured language similar to Pascal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action!_(programming_language)

I wrote a lot of stuff in Action! and sold some of it... for a lot less than minimum wage if I count all the hours I spent playing with it.