I'm not entirely sure about SmartSuite actually...
I'm probably biased, since the last time I used SmartSuite was a couple of years ago when it was the '97 edition. Personally, I thought it was awful, and Lotus Approach was the largest pile of pants of pants I'd ever seen - which is dire considering some of the opposition it was up against.
I've not had the pleasure of using SmartSuite Millennium edition, so I've no idea how much better it is. I've heard that it on a par with M$ (*retch*) Office 2000, so it must have improved massively. Maybe it's just personal preference but using SmartSuite was not intuitive at all for me, and I found gathering the information I needed to help me learn about it was verging on the painful. This is not a good thing for a first-time user to experience in any peice of software! Having said that, the major thrust of most well-established software products these days is not making them run any better or any faster, but adding a few more features that certain customers are after and, primarily, examining the Human-Computer Interaction of the software with the users. In fact, I think that HCI analysis is where big companies like IBM spend a significant chunk of their software development budgets these days.
As an aside, one my friends - hi Rick - works for a large technology development company, and the three most commonly uttered words are "I hate Microsoft!"
Hopefully one of these days that will no longer be the case, due the lack of use of it's software. Or because the revolution has come.:-)
Isn't there a perverse incentive when software is GPL'd but the authors are in the business of selling support to produce software that requires support for effective use, both by having obscure gotcha's and by not providing adequate documentation?
One thing that was continually drummed into me during my Software Development lectures at University during my MSc in IT (don't laugh - it's not as bad as it sounds) is that documentation is critical to ensuring the principle of FUMPER [Flexibility, Useability, Maintainability, Portability, and, erm, something and Readability (I think)] of that Sfotware.
The mainstay of good coding is documentation within the code itself, so that every design decision is explained line by line so that others can see what you were driving at when you coded it. Heck, it's useful to you too if you have to go back to that even two or three weeks down the line. It'll save you several hours, if not days of effort going "WTF was I thinking or trying to do with this bit of code?"
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I'm probably biased, since the last time I used SmartSuite was a couple of years ago when it was the '97 edition. Personally, I thought it was awful, and Lotus Approach was the largest pile of pants of pants I'd ever seen - which is dire considering some of the opposition it was up against.
I've not had the pleasure of using SmartSuite Millennium edition, so I've no idea how much better it is. I've heard that it on a par with M$ (*retch*) Office 2000, so it must have improved massively. Maybe it's just personal preference but using SmartSuite was not intuitive at all for me, and I found gathering the information I needed to help me learn about it was verging on the painful. This is not a good thing for a first-time user to experience in any peice of software! Having said that, the major thrust of most well-established software products these days is not making them run any better or any faster, but adding a few more features that certain customers are after and, primarily, examining the Human-Computer Interaction of the software with the users. In fact, I think that HCI analysis is where big companies like IBM spend a significant chunk of their software development budgets these days.
As an aside, one my friends - hi Rick - works for a large technology development company, and the three most commonly uttered words are "I hate Microsoft!"
Hopefully one of these days that will no longer be the case, due the lack of use of it's software. Or because the revolution has come. :-)
One thing that was continually drummed into me during my Software Development lectures at University during my MSc in IT (don't laugh - it's not as bad as it sounds) is that documentation is critical to ensuring the principle of FUMPER [Flexibility, Useability, Maintainability, Portability, and, erm, something and Readability (I think)] of that Sfotware.
The mainstay of good coding is documentation within the code itself, so that every design decision is explained line by line so that others can see what you were driving at when you coded it. Heck, it's useful to you too if you have to go back to that even two or three weeks down the line. It'll save you several hours, if not days of effort going "WTF was I thinking or trying to do with this bit of code?"
There endeth the lesson. So ner.