Slashdot Mirror
Where is the Killer Calendar?
AnonaCow writes "Firefox and Thunderbird rock my world, but Mozilla's Calendar (Sunbird) has a long way to go. This maybe mundane, but what software does the slashdot community use to schedule? How do you keep track of your various appointments? What about your 'To Do' List?"
That sounds nice -- have you released it to the world? If not, please do.
Well see, processor speed really has nothing to do with bloat.
This machine I'm typing on has a cool 128 MB of ram. Loading an application that requires 25 software libraries to do something as simple as sort a list or add a funky widget toolbar is not something this machine can withstand with ease. Running thin, streamlined apps is something that keeps my machine enjoyable to use.
That said, the Open Source world is far from listening to our calls to reduce bloat; instead they drive forward, coding the same application over and over, disorganized libraries, untracable dependencies, all and all just masses of code lumped together. While this bulk of code has thousands of useful features, many of them are hidden from sight behind a terminal which scares people away, and the few that make it through to the desktop are often behind clunky software libraries that people are constantly at war building and defending.
I hope this post doesn't come off as a troll because I really love and enjoy Linux and the BSDs that gracefully allowed Mac OS X to come into being, but I seriously hope that we get better at organizing our efforts as developers and software engineers and not continue forever honing our programming skills. While an app may not be perfect, it can Just Work, and we can fix the bugs as we go. For the critial apps, good design begets good implementation. We should embrace these lessons as we look to the future.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush