Rants

Spent most of the day wrestling with this wretched API. What a complete waste of time. Tells me the request is complete, but wants me to wait an unknown amount of time before actually letting me retrieve the response. Ugh.

Forget it. I'll just shove the whole thing off onto a separate thread and let that sit and wait for as long as it needs.

"I'll buy it if I want it and can't write it". Or, to put it another way, if I think I could cook up the app myself in a Saturday's worth of hacking and drinking, then I expect to get it free. That might not be entirely reasonable... but it's how i think. The result of this is that for smaller programs, I tend to open my wallet for the ones that really go above and beyond the norm.

Notable "utility" apps I've laid out money for in the past few years:

• Trillian
• TV Tool (a nice little utility for bypassing the onerous DRM restrictions and sad TV support implemented by NVidia drivers).
• Nero
• Firebug (ok, this was a donation… but I’d have paid it if I’d needed to)

They all do things I needed, couldn't get free, and would have spent months working out on my own. And with the exception of Firebug, they all have terrible user interfaces. Heck, just about every single app I use has a rotten UI. VS2005 is probably one of the better apps, but it can hardly be classified as "utility" - it's huge, written by hundreds of developers, and… still has a lot of problems. I certainly would never use words like "beautifully" (or even "seamlessly") to describe how they integrate with the core system. Indeed, if there's one thing common to most of the apps I use, it’s how eager they are to make you aware that you’re using them. Splash screens, heavy UIs, custom dialogs for things that the system does better, modal dialogs for things that should be non-modal…

…but such ranting gets old, eventually. Instead, I'll just give an example: source control.

At this moment, I have four source control clients installed on this machine. Three of them offer "integration" by way of a Visual Studio plug-in. But only the fourth actually integrates at all well into my workflow: the TortoiseSVN client makes source control almost seamlessly available from any OS-provided file system view, including the standard Open and Save dialogs. The rest all provide pale imitations of the old two-pane Fileman/Explorer interface, usually with a few more panes tacked on for for status or other information. All three, without fail, require me to have either a command prompt or an Explorer window open on the "working directory" for whatever project I’m viewing, because they don’t provide a UI for common file management tasks. And that token nod at “integration”? VS becomes slower with it turned on, and continually locks files I don’t want locked. In short, they provide the worst of both worlds: UIs I could have written on a drunken Saturday, but would never have wanted to. Tortoise, for all its problems, provides something I’d willingly pay for out of pocket: I’m actually more productive with it than without it. None of the rest, paid commercial products though they are, comes close to this.

So, Paul - I'm glad you're happy with Mac software. I don't know that I really believe it's as good as what you make it out to be, but I'll believe it is that good for you. Because, somewhere, someone must be writing usable software. I want to believe it...

A sketchy Channel 9 post about Vista's new Restart Manager

The exciting bit for me isn't that Vista might need to be rebooted less often. Rebooting is part of Life, especially when that Life involves Windows. It's been getting slowly better for years, but i don't expect this to eliminate it or even make it dramatically easier.

The exciting bit is the standardized API for notifying programs that they are being restarted, and should save and restore their state. Not bug the user about saving stuff, or throw changes away, or start uploading massive amounts of data to a slow network drive... just quickly save the current state of things so that it can be restored later.

Why is this exciting? It may not be for you, if you're one of those careful, organized people who don't tend to keep 30 files open in seven different text editors along with a dozen or so emails and ten or so websites... But i'm not one of those people, and it really bugs me when my machine locks up or i have to reboot to install patches, and it takes me the rest of the day to get comfortable with my work environment again. If i could add a little script that allowed me to reboot while first saving the state of all those various apps, i could then go get a soda, knowing that i could go right back to work when i got back.

Nice, eh? Eh? Eh!

Not exciting enough? Then how 'bout this: remember OS/2? The Workplace Shell? I loved writing code in OS/2... even when i was writing for DOS (most of the time), i loved the environment. Why? I didn't need an IDE! My work environment in OS/2 consisted of a folder for each project, containing one or two command prompts and the source files that made up the project (.cpp, .h, Makefile, etc...). Larger projects might contain sub-folders for libraries, etc.

Doesn't sound too unusual, right? Why would i prefer such a classic, pedestrian means of managing projects over a nice shiny IDE-based project manager?

Because when you closed a WPS folder, documents opened from it closed with it... And when you re-opened the folder, the previously opened documents re-opened!

This was brilliant - i could open and close source files, change the arrangement of windows, setup command prompts with specialized paths, scripts, etc. and rest assured that i could close the whole mess whenever i needed to, and when i re-opened it it would be restored just as i left it.

For ten years, i've been waiting for Windows to come up with something as conceptually simple and yet functionally powerful as this nearly-forgotten interface from the early '90s. Finally, [in another three or five years when Vista has become common enough for developers to actually care about writing for it] i can have it.