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Tiny Apps
box2321 writes: "There's a time and a place for large and feature-filled software. And there's a place for tiny apps - in fact, there's tinyapps.org. This is a mighty-fine resource for free and shared Win/DOS programs that weigh in under 1.44 MB. I learned of TinyApps from a pleasant source."
Tell me that after installing a GUI desktop on your Linux box. Are you really claiming that X+GNOME or X+KDE and a plethora of widget sets in order to get a decent number of programs running is less-bloated and better-designed than Windows desktop?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The more and more end-user applications are developed for the linux desktop, the more and more bloated the software will be. People don't have the time to tailor source to make small, powerful apps, and end users want complete functionality, glitz, and polish.
How many people use all of the functions in an office package? Open Office is as much to blame as Microsoft Office for unnecessary tools, as are many other software packages. Why should I give up 200+ megs of disk space so I can type a couple of letters, an e-mail, and make a simple bar graph, and have it look like someone over the age of four did it?
A small, clean word processor that has the capability to snap in additional functions, like dictionary, thesaurus, forms, and html editing, or several grades of the program, tailored to different classes of users would save a lot of disk space, and remove confusion. It would also go a long way to creating and enforcing standards among the different OS'es and programs which are available.
QuantumLINK is AOL. Back in the late 80's the people who ran QuantumLINK realized that running a service for a steadily decreasing number of C64 and C128 wasn't a good long term strategy. So they shutdown Qlink and reinvented themselves as AOL. The rest, as they say, is history.
Interesting concept. Linux's standard utilities are unnecessarily bloated, replacing them with smallutils allows a respectable distribution to fit on a 1.44MB floppy. According to the documentation, these utilities are included:
No offense or anything, but I bet you've never played with making single-diskette Linux images.
Quite frankly, an app like busybox(which is written, for the most part, in C) does a *hell* of a lot more to conserve space by including a bunch of apps in one binary than by writing less than a dozen (extremely trivial) tools in ASM. Hell, almost all of those tools are basically wrappers for single kernel syscalls. The approach that fellow has taken may work for extraordinarily simple stuff like that, but as soon as you try to get into anything more complex(like, say, a #!/bin/sh implementation), you're pretty much out of luck.
I suggest you take a look at busybox(search Freshmeat) if you're interested in single-floppy Linux installs.
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
You might need to take a look to RiscOS which makes it quite easy for the hosted apps to be *tiny* (a complete DTP package supporting plugins weights several hundreds kB)...
RiscOS is around as old as Windows3 but has always been well designed, quick, compact and responsive.
But I understand such tinyness might seem mythical for PC users.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
In the days of huge software programs it always amazes me to see what can be done in such small packages (each 4k jar file includes the source code too).
I take it you're not counting the 14Mb runtime that you need to make that Jar file work?
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra