Hello Allie, Saturday, September 4, 2004, 5:44:44 AM, you wrote:
> Tony, [T] wrote: >> Add fat graphics, animated stuff, and useless gadgets. IMO TB! made >> it's 1st step in that direction with the new icons and promise of >> skins. > <soapbox> > You know, I find this interesting. Me too. :-) > The very common negative commentary about new icons and smilies with > improved XP look support is just testimony to how these things are > noticed, whether it be positively or negatively. The 1st thing I do after installing XP is reverting everything to classic w2k look. > The applications appearance is the first thing that greets the user. Agreed. And important to me. > Putting reliability and robust functionality aside as being a must, an > attractive interface adds a lot to an application that requires day to > day user interaction. But v2 had a nice look. Fat icons are one of the reasons that scared me away from Outlook (and Eudora) So the looks can attract and scare away users. And even if RitLabs hired 100 graphics artists TB! will never be main stream. It's targeted at a different market than Outlook. A market with people that are prepared to invest more time in an application. And I could be very wrong here but I think that kind of people are teh ones that complain the most about bloatware. > IOW's, if I had two applications with equal > functionality, reliability and ease of use, I'd personally go for the > one that I found more pleasant to look at. It's not a waste of time > and development to spend a while focusing on improving the > applications appearance. Furthermore, it's not usually the cause of > unreliability creeping in, neither does it contribute much to bloating > the software. On itself not. But somehow it often goes hand in hand with instability/bloating. Everything can be programmed bugfree. However company policy dictates how long is spend on tracking bugs. > What has made TB! difficult to tame in terms of reliability and bugs > are not the introduction of smilies and the efforts at improving the > applications appearance as is so commonly mentioned, > I'm sure there's more. It's these major additions/enhancements that > have made TB!'s executable that much larger, Sure it makes it larger. But I'm also sure that TB! could fit in half the size! But that would take a lot longer to program. I'm aware of that. It's just like K9. Below 100Kb and outperforms all/most 4MB+ spam filters. > that much harder to > maintain it's reliability and to keep the bugs out. Perhaps these > major features could have been introduced more gradually? A more > reliable approach perhaps? That makes for a sound argument. That probably would be a better approach. I do a little programming myself and I learned that debugging every feature before adding more functionality saves lots of time later. > But please, I'm personally really getting tired of the comments about > smilies and new icons as if they comprise a HUGE coding effort that > could have been channeled elsewhere, or that they comprise a > significant source of buggy behaviour and bloat in TB!. But please, I'm personally really getting tired of the comments about what I'm allowed to say :-) If everybody shuts up how should RitLabs know what its users wants. And you selectively snipped all the stuff I said in favour of RitLabs to make it look like hate mail. Besides I think you missed my point about icons and smilies. History has proven that it very often (not always) is a start of bloatware. See my example of Norton. Or Microsoft. Another example. So many bug fixes. Yes large programs like office are harder to debug. But they have an army of programmers working on it. -- Tony I don't have to be dead to donate my organ. Want it? ________________________________________________ Current version is 3.00.00 | 'Using TBUDL' information: http://www.silverstones.com/thebat/TBUDLInfo.html
