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About Ian's Software Site
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Background:
Having been involved with personal computers since the very earliest days, I've witnessed some amazing advances
in the past quarter of a century. There's no doubt that today's computers and software are both amazingly powerful
and that there are programs available to do just about anything.
However, I've also seen some developments that really bug me!
Bigger and Better?
First and foremost, I've seen a lot of software getting bigger without necessarily getting better. It seems that
many software developers have lost sight of just how simple and elegant a computer program can be! There is so
much emphasis on making programs "pretty", which would be fine if it wasn't at the expense of making them
reliable.
For example, when I delete a bunch of files, I really don't need to see animations of bits of paper flying through
the air, getting crumpled, and disappearing in a rubbish bin. Sure, they're "cute", but all of this extra nonsense
is contributing to making Windows so big, clunky and unreliable.
Questionable Activities:
Secondly, the growth and expansion of the Internet has seen the emergence of a lot of questionable software. Many
programs use the Internet to gather information about users and/or track their usage. Even when such tactics are
not immediately "insidious", it bothers me that the biggest software companies are creating a real "dependence"
on their particular web-site (eg. for "scheduled updates"), and that people are already taking this dependence for
granted!
My Solution:
I therefore started doing my own experiments to "get back to basics". I wanted to see just how small I could make
a useful program. My collection of "micro-applications" started with some simple utilities (such as my
ClipText program), then expanded to some more powerful applications.
The latest of these are my image optimization programs
JPGExtra and
PNGExtra, which I'm sure will become very useful programs to anyone else who, like me, realizes the benefits
to be gained by optimizing the image files on their web sites.
Conclusion:
I know that many people won't understand this minimalist philosophy, considering that computers continue to get
more powerful and that there is less "need" to optimize to this extent. For those that do understand, I hope that
you enjoy using one or more of my micro-applications.
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