Six Laws of the New Software

LordFoom writes "Still suffering from post-dotcom stress disorder, I keep my eye out for gentle balm to sooth my ravaged psyche. The manifestos at ChangeThis are not it. The most popular manifestos range from irritating to enlightening, with none of them particularly comforting. In particular the recent Six Laws of the New Software have done my dreams of writing lucrative code no good - although it has changed my idea of what money-making code is."

Comments

In a nutshell

[winkydink]

Keep it simple
Keep it small
You're not gonna be the next Microsoft
Do many releases
Comply with relevant standards

Direct link

[Dancin_Santa]

Link to article

Be careful, it locks up Firefox until it loads.

Next time I'll check the link better.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actual pdf

pdftotext

[flossie]

The SIX LAWS of the NEW SOFTWARE
GO AHEAD AND PRINT THIS. This manifesto

continued

is toner-friendly: the backgrounds wont print on paper and are only visible on-screen to aid readability. We recommend printing a test page as some older printers do not support this Acrobat feature.

by Dror Eyal
NEXT

Not using Adobe Acrobat? Please go to http://changethis.com/content/reader

The first wave of software is over, it is doubtful that any one company will capture the market like Microsoft or SAP did. Not because the software they write isn't better or has less functionality, they've simply arrived too late. Most home consumers have all the software they will ever need, and most companies out there already have all the basic technologies they need to successfully compete right now.
I can hear their objections all the way down here, and I agree, your software is better designed, faster, has more features, is more user-friendly and can indeed make seven flavours of coffee. We have something similar, it isnt well designed, it doesnt have half of the features that yours has and no, it doesnt run on Service Orientated Architecture. We did however pay a small fortune for the per-seat licences, we have learnt to use it quite comfortably over the last five years and this is the system that our business runs on. This view isnt limited to us -- Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, in a 2000 article published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, argued that "the most important GO AHEAD AND PRINT uses of THIS. This manifesto computers were developed more than a decade into the past, not currently."

is toner-friendly: the Its a fairly bleak view to be sure, but one that isnt unique to Mr Gordon. Many business backgrounds wont executives print on paper and are are turning away from purchasing new technologies and looking for new ways to use their only visible on-screen existing technologies effectively. Not because the new software entering the market to aid readability. We recommend printing a test page as some older printers do not support this Acrobat feature.

isnt better, but because the functionality that they need already exists in software that was bought years ago. Budgets for software expenditure are dropping and the accountants are starting to question why the software that was essential last year needs an upgrade this year. What this means to the average software developer is that the window of opportunity for selling into the corporate market and to some the degree the home market is getting smaller than ever before. So does this mean that this is the end for the software industry? Obviously not, we will continue to develop better products, occasionally new technology will get developed and or a new idea will start a trend and software will get developed around it. Software that meets a new need will always be welcome. Who knew that we needed file sharing software before Napster turned the music industry on its ear? Or that social software and bloging tools were essential if your company was to be seen to be on the cutting edge? No, it isnt the end, but for every tool that revolutionizes the industry and strikes a path into a new territory there are several hundred software companies out there trying to build a better CRM or CMS -- the software industry equivalent of the mousetrap. Obviously it would be better if we all developed software that met a new need and created new markets, but just as obviously we cant all develop revolutionary new software. Most of the software being developed right now in studios around the world is trying to find a niche in existing and saturated markets. So how do you build software that stands out and can compete in this new environGO AHEAD AND PRINT ment? You build a tool based on new generation software laws. THIS. This manifesto
is toner-friendly: the backgrounds wont print on paper and are only visible on-screen to aid readability. We recommend printing a test page as some older printers do not support this Acrob

Hint: How to avoid PDF lock-up in Firefox

[QuestionsNotAnswers]

Tools | Options | Downloads | Plugins

Untick PDF.

Now whenever you click on a PDF link you are prompted if you want to view it in Adobe PDF viewer.

Works for me!

Re:Here's another law to add

[Leo McGarry]

This old saw needs to die, now. It's completely false to say that "the whole graphics subsystem is built on PDF." That simply isn't so. Let me explain where that came from.

Back in the olden days, there was this thing called QuickDraw. QuickDraw was pretty incredible. It consisted of a full-featured set of routines for drawing on the screen, and the whole business fit inside something like 32 KB of ROM.

QuickDraw was based on the idea of pixels. Everything was a pixel. Drawing with QuickDraw was based entirely around pixels.

Quartz abandoned the idea of pixels in order to give programmers a device- and resolution-independent graphics toolbox. Quartz consists of two parts: a drawing library called Quartz 2D, and a windowing and real-time compositing system originally called Quartz Compositor. A couple years back, Quartz Compositor was re-implemented in GPU code and re-christened Quartz Extreme. (Quartz Compositor still runs on Macs without programmable GPUs.)

The imaging model used for Quartz 2D was inspired by both Display PostScript and PDF, but it's not the same as either of them. Unlike QuickDraw, where everything was about pixels, in Quartz 2D it's all about paint. Quartz 2D establishes a floating-point coordinate system called a context, and the programmer draws on the context by defining regions and filling them with paint. Internally, everything is represented as a display list, as opposed to a bitmap like in the old days. The display list gets rendered to the screen by Quartz Extreme.

Because Quartz 2D uses a similar imaging model to PDF's, Quartz 2D display lists can be translated to PDF trivially. The whole business is handled for you. All you have to do is request a Core Graphics PDF context instead of a regular Core Graphics context and draw to it just like you were drawing to a window. Core Graphics is responsible for translating your Quartz 2D display list into PDF.

So let's be totally clear here: None of the graphics on your Mac are represented internally in PDF format until your program explicitly requests that a display list be saved in PDF format. Internally, everything is a Quartz 2D display list. The computer converts to and from Quartz 2D quickly and easily through the use of some highly optimized Core Graphics code.

Now, you wanna know why Acrobat is so much slower than Preview? Because Acrobat uses its own PDF interpreter to go from PDF to QuickDraw. This takes a ton of CPU time, compared to going from PDF to a Quartz 2D display list. So Acrobat is both much bigger (because it includes a whole PDF interpreter) and much slower than Preview.

On Windows or Linux or whatever other incredibly lame operating system you want to consider, a PDF reader is necessarily going to be big and slow, because it's gonna have to translate from PDF into some bitmap format. Old operating systems don't have the advantage of having an internal display-list graphics format that's conceptually similar to PDF, or a hardware-accelerated compositor that's responsible for turning those display lists into pixels. But that still doesn't change the fact that the PDF specification is wide open, and anybody who wants to should be able to write his or her own PDF reader for those old operating systems.

Incidentally, Quartz 2D used to be notably slower than QuickDraw for doing lots of basic tasks. If you take antialiasing and transparency off the table and just deal with drawing lines, QuickDraw used to kick Quartz 2D's ass. No more, though, because Quartz 2D has recently been rewritten to take advantage of programmable GPUs, just like Quartz Compositor was rewritten and became Quartz Extreme. Now, depending on the kind of GPU you have, Quartz 2D can be anywhere up to 40 times faster than QuickDraw ...and that's with antialiasing and transparency. It's pretty amazing.

Frankly, it kinda makes me wonder why more people aren't raving about Quartz. I guess it's probably because most people don't unde