There is a lot of “Change” going around nowadays. And I’m not talking about Washington DC.
There are a lot of changes to software are being done for no reason other than to make changes. This all may be a side effect of my age, but I don’t like this. No, that’s not really right, I fucking hate it. I can more or less understand why for sale for profit products make changes, but I am at a loss as to why “free” products that are not open source sort of things feel they have to make changes to the product. I really don’t understand changes that seem to do nothing but dink with the user interface.
Case one: Adobe Reader. Version 7, rocks and rocks hard. Versions 8 and 9, no changes, at least that I can see, to functionality, but massive changes to the user interface. Both suck and not in a good way. On the Windows running PC this isn’t so bad, because there is Foxit reader, which is close enough the the look and feel of version 7 as to not be that big of a deal, and is screaming fast. No non-beta version for Linux or OS X, however. xpdf and kpdf (both of which can be made to run on Linux and OS X) come close, but they still have issues. If you know the magic you can get to the older versions of the “offical” reader, but it’s still a pain in the butt.
Case two: Google and Gmail. Stop dinking with the user interface, if your not going to add functionality to go along with it. The more I deal with the side based tabs, the less happy I get.
Case three: Wordpress. MySQL based revision control isn’t a good idea. Stop it. At least make it so that you can turn it off via something like a normal method. Dinking with config.php isn’t a normal method. Un-documented dinking with config.php is even worse. Doing “push” ‘You need to update’ messages, with out saying if it a bug fix, security patch or UI dink is also bad form. I’d be just as happy if I didn’t have to deal with checking in with Wordpress HQ every time I fire up the admin tools for the blog, thank you very much. That includes your freaking RSS feed on the start page. Oh, wait, we call those “dashboards” now. grrrrrr.
Case four: Mac OS X 10.5 Just say no.
Case 5: Windows Vista. Just say no thank you.
Case 6: KDE 4. Less flashy bits, more functionality, please. A major point of running Linux is that you can run on machines with less “grunt” than you need for Windows et. al. KDE 4 takes that away, at least stock out of the box.
Don’t get me wrong, there is some new software out there I really like. Ubuntu 8.x, major upgrade over any other version of Linux. Quite possibly the best desktop operating system ever done. Can and will recommend to any one using an Intel processor. Firefox 3.x Possibly the best browser ever made. The Gimp and digiKam seem to just get better with each release. What’s important about all these releases is that are functionality upgrades, with out near useless tweaks to the user interface. Changes to the UI are minor, and are made to support real functionally upgrades, not just going with what ever the current fad is on buttons and icons.
