NEAT DESKTOP SOFTWARE LIGHT VS REGULAR WINDOWS

My web browser and my chat were causing each other to error out.Р”Р„JAX was not around until late in the Pentium II lifecycle.

NEAT DESKTOP SOFTWARE LIGHT VS REGULAR WINDOWS

Back when the Pentium II was first released, I even had to close applications, not because the computer ran out of RAM, but because the TCP/IP stack that came with Windows 95 didnРІР‚в„ўt allow very many simultaneous connections.

What I remember from the time was how you couldnРІР‚в„ўt run that many things simultaneously. You are looking back at the past with rosy goggles. Alas, time and again, companies show they prefer total control over the ecosystem surrounding their service. And speaking of alternative clients, maybe that could be the way to go - focus on monetizing the service, but embrace different ways of accessing it.

Spotify by using YouTube instead (which is arguably lighter resource-wise). Most people I know exercise their preferences wrt. Slack by using Ripcord instead of the official client. And that value has, again, nothing to do with softare, and everything to do with the deals they've managed to secure with artists and labels. Or Spotify, whose biggest value is that it's a cheap and legal alternative to pirating music.

Sure, a factor in this is that it works on multiple platforms (including mobile) and you don't have to worry about setting it up for yourself, but that has nothing to do with the in-app features and overall UX. It's universally handed down onto you from somewhere above you in the corporate, and you're forced to use it. > In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too.Р”Р„nd the kicker is, consumers don't have a say in this process anyway. I'm not saying that I agree with it, but it's how the market works. In other words, so long as consumers prioritise functionality over the efficiency of the program, it makes good business sense for you to prioritise that too. Instead, that 'extra cost' is an oppotunity cost: a reduced rate of implementing functionality. What's more, the 'extra cost' of a more efficient program is not just extra expense spent on developers - it's hard to hire developers so you probably wouldn't just hire an extra developer or two and get the same feature set with greater efficiency. In practice people still use these programs so it seems the reduced income is minimal. The decision hinges on whether the extra cost results in extra income or reduced cost elsewhere. Assuming that it takes less developer effort - even just a little - to implement an inefficient desktop application, it comes down to a business decision (assuming these are programs created by businesses, which Spotify and Slack are). I'm not convinced it's the programmers driving these decisions. > I also think it has to do with the fact that older programmers now more about the cost of resources than younger programmers do. In many ways, software has regressed significantly. But other things, like sending a text message or email, most certainly do not. In terms of improvement, some things are understandable and rational, such as newer video codecs requiring more processing power because they are intrinsically more complex and that complexity is essential to their increase in quality. I lived through that era, so I knew it was possible, but the younger generation hasn't, so perhaps it skews their idea of efficiency. Even the web stuff at the time was nowhere near as disgusting as it is today - AJAX was around, websites did use JS, but simple things like webchats still didn't require as much bloat. All of that was comfortably possible - simultaneously - with 256MB of RAM and a single-core 400MHz Pentium II. That doesn't mean we should be wasting it to do the same or even less functionality we had with the machines of 10 or 20 years ago.Р”Р‡or example, IM, video/audio calls, and working with email shouldn't take hundreds of MB of RAM, a GHz-level many-core processor, and GBs of disk space. Yes, computers have gotten faster and memory and disks much larger. The efficiency difference between native and 'modern' web stuff is easily several orders of magnitude you can write very useful applications that are only a few KB in size, a single binary, and that same binary will work across 25 years of OS versions.

As a long-time Win32 developer, my only answer to that question is 'of course there is!'

Neat desktop software light vs regular