Why is it so hard to find Windows programs that do what you want them to do and nothing more? I mean, organize my photo album. I'd love to do that. Write another program to do that. Don't put it in the video camera capture program.
You could argue that the whole idea of "program that does what you want it to do and nothing more" is a UNIX idea, but I don't buy that. I remember plenty of utilities in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days that were like that.
Then I thought that maybe Windows software authors are enamored of the shareware idea, so they put in lots of stuff so people would register (not that people ever do). But although that's probably a part of it, many of the good old utilities I just mentioned were shareware. Even modern shareware doesn't neccessarily manifest this problem a lot; I haven't used WinZip much, but it's shareware and it doesn't get in my face with features I don't need.
Then I thought that the sort of person who wrote that kind of utility probably doesn't write for Windows anymore, having moved in general to the free UNIX platforms. I think that's the most reasonable explanation, although I'm sure there are others. This is kind of a shame, because if people have to put up with Windows they shouldn't also have to put up with lousy application software.
If I wanted to be sarcastic and Microsoft-bashing I'd say that the authors of Windows software are trying to emulate Microsoft by smushing programs that should be separate into one big blob. But I won't. Even though I just said it by implication, I don't believe that's what it is.
Sun Jun 25 2000 11:07:
I found a program on TUCOWS called MediaCenter which, while it has the usual crop of useless features I don't need, is about 70 megs smaller than the Adobe program, and recognizes that the preferred format for graphics file transfer is JPG. It puts the JPGs in a stupid place and is not very elegant because the actual transfer is done in the helper app for my particular model of camera, but it's good enough that it won't pain me excessively to use it once a day during the trip.
Sun Jun 25 2000 11:20:
Susanna has a login name for some website or other of "perfect insomniac". This is close enough to Joyce's "ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia" to arouse suspicion, but she claims never to have heard of that phrase. Hmm.
