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December 18, 2003

Bad Software Design Decisions

I don’t know if today’s major software developers are getting lazy, dumb or just want to irritate their user base to the point of obsurdity. Hardware design and innovation has been kicking ass for over a decade. Moore’s Law, the doubling of processor speed every 18 months, has been keeping pace, and looks to for at least another decade before sputtering out.

The big software companies just haven’t been able to keep up. The closest, I would say, is Apple, with tons of amazing software coming out of there in just the last few years. Of course, Apple is using software to sell their hardware, so they’ve got reason to make it work well. There are bugs and irritating qualities in OS X, Final Cut Pro and the like, but for the most part, they run amazingly well.

Two companies that need to get their act together: Macromedia and Adobe. Huge companies working on huge software. As a professional designer, applications from these companies are my life. Still, I have had to convince my boss every year or two that we needed to upgrade because the latest and greatest was just that. Lately, with a slough of new versions coming out, I start the process again — find out what’s so great, and convince the boss how this will make the work that I do better, make me more productive, or both. The problem is, this time, I’m not very convinced myself — and it isn’t me. It’s the software.

After taking the time to download and test Macromedia’s new MX 2004 suite — new Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash — I wanted to shake my monitor. My biggest beef with the previous MX app incarnations? Slow and buggy. I don’t use most of the bells and whistles they put in those old versions, so I didn’t care much about the long list of new ones added to MX ‘04. What I did care about was that the new apps were even slower than the previous versions! Slower! Why should I care about new bells and whistles if it take fifteen seconds to open every file? Or to save a file? How about just typing copy into a Dreamweaver layout? I feel like I’m working on my 286 PC in Word 2.0 again — type a line…wait…repeat. My 200MHz machine with Dreamweaver 2 could type in real time. I’ve got two 1GHz processors and 10 times the RAM in my current box, and I have to wait for characters to appear on the screen? And forget about doing custom CSS-based design in Dreamweaver. Heck, forget about doing it by hand and trying to look at it in Dreamweaver! These are basic things that we should expect a professional Web development application to be able to do.

Flash was so slow that I don’t have enough time to get into it. And Flash movies still play like crap on a Mac. It can’t be that hard to write a decent player. Apple has spent a lot of time and effort making OS X’s graphics system blazingly fast. OpenGL, Quartz Extreme, blah blah blah — surely somebody at Macromedia must have heard of these.

Adobe, don’t gloat too much. You’re apps are ten times better than Macromedia’s. They are actually professional quality. But you’ve had longer to work on them. My question: why, when processors are getting faster and we’re giving you more RAM to work with, do you squander it away and make your apps slower than their previous verions? Illustrator has gotten slower with every release since version 8. InDesign is dog slow. And now Photoshop, your shining star, is losing its lustre. You know you can do better. You’re not Macromedia, you don’t have to settle for crappy software just to get it out the door. We’re here for you. We’ll wait. Just give it to us right the first time. We’ll make it worth your while.

The worst of the worst in all of this is, of course, Microsoft. They’ve been doing this for years. Is Microsoft Office really that much better since Office 95? It has a bunch of fancy new features, requires a lot more resources, and plays a little nicer, but overall functionality really hasn’t changed much. Same thing for Outlook, Exchange, Windows, etc. It all comes back to features over performance. The problem with working for the lowest common denominator, but still pandering to specific groups, is that you get bloatware. Something for everybody, but it ends up buggy, slow, and — in Microsoft’s case — insecure.

Now look at Apple. When they start trying to do too much with their software, they break it up into separate pieces. iLife could have been one big, bloated package. Instead, we have iTunes, iMovie, iDVD, and iPhoto on their own, each doing its little job the best it can. There is a lot of power built into those little apps. Now, look at their pro apps. Final Cut Pro is getting to be huge. It needs to be for certain power users, but they don’t want to lose niche customers because their main app is too big, awkward or expensive. So they release Final Cut Express for people who just want to edit on DV, but need something more powerful than iMovie. Then they release Soundtrack for audio geeks who just want to mess around with music and don’t need the added features in Final Cut Pro or Logic Platinum. Do iCal, Address Book and Mail all work together? Yes. How about iTunes, iMovie, iDVD and iPhoto? You betcha! Are they all shoved together in one monster app? No. This is a Good Thing™. People that say otherwise aren’t paying attention.

Okay, I feel a little better now. Maybe I’ll go out and play in the snow, and realize that it isn’t as bad as it seems. [Sigh]

Posted by paullheureux at December 18, 2003 11:32 AM

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Posted by: Naladahc at December 23, 2003 09:19 AM

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