What is good Software?

Woebot

Well-known member
I've used a few bits of really good software in my time.

A rotoscoping app called Commotion which circa Rev2.2 was just gourgeous. Had really been "thought into" when it was built.

Maya which I use alot now is also a beautiful bit of software. The reason being that it doesn't needlessly complicate itself. You don't have a Mirror tool like some (naff) 3D apps, you just duplicate around an axis. The interface is extremely close to the coding, but without being disgustingly complicating the use of the app. This makes for a very uninteruptive kinda unmediated user experience.

Shake is another beautiful bit of software for similar reasons but I'm new to it. You can tell a great bit of software by the level of love its community groups give to it.

Toon Boom Studio. Another nice bit of software. Custom built,

I reckon there must be some lovely database softwares.

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Bad software.

Almost everything Microsoft has ever made. Always build on legacy code. Horrible interface design. Buggy. Counter-intuitive menus again always bolted on from edition to edition. Word is a particulary horriible bit of software.

Bloatware, that is stuff that is overcoded...lots of guilty 3d apps. I've always thought Studio Max was a repulsive bit of engineering. Lightwave too, which I used for years (the equivalent of a rotting mansion with built-on extensions).

Lots of PC software. That generic cg/sci-fi look and always way too many whistles and knobs.
 

turtles

in the sea
Mmmm, subject close to my own (nerdy) heart, Woebot.

Unfortunately can't comment on any of your favorite apps, as I don't do much in the way of graphics work. Though I'm interested to know why you think it's a good thing that Maya's interface is so close to the code, generally this is considered a bad thing in interface design. The general principle being that an interface should be based around what the user needs to do, and how the user needs to do it, rather than how it is actually done in the underlying code.

Anyway, for me, a couple of favorites would be Eclipse, for coding, has a some really nice features, very modular, very slick.

Also a big fan of TextPad, which is a simple text editor except they put in just enough features so it really has most of your basic word processing needs, without being all bulky and slow like word. I love it, and in fact am using it right now to write this.

Fairly keen on Firefox as well, at least compared to IE. Things like tabbed browsing (so good for using google!) and type-ahead find are really handy.



As for bad software, yeah MS generally takes the cake here, software bloat and feature creep get them every time. Though I feel the need to defend their programmers a bit, in that it's usually the marketing department that does them in. Features sell, right, at least that is the general opinion of marketing departments. So they try and cram as many features into all of their programs (EA does the same thing with their video games) so that they can have a big long list on the side of the box--and for whatever reason people feel compelled to buy the piece of software with the longer list, even if they don't need the features, and the program is generally less user friendly. Thus usability and aesthetics get left behind cuz they're a lot harder to market (though Apple does try).

Generally the problem for a long time was that software was written completely by programmers. Programmers are good at writing code, but generally have no training in interface design or any of that, so they just kind of winged it, worked really hard on the back end and then threw something together for the front end. This is changing though, lots more "user experience" teams in software houses, testing out designs with users to see if they really work or not, things like that.


But yeah, good software==usability + aesthetics, in my mind


<img src="http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/images/webform1.gif">
This was presented to me in class as "the worst interface ever"
 

DigitalDjigit

Honky Tonk Woman
Unix...not the OS itself so much but you gotta love all those little tools like find, sort, grep, head, cat and so on that fit together and can do so much for you.

VuePrint - the best image viewing software I've ever found. Been using it since '96 (the same old version...never felt the need to upgrade). Loads fast, doesn't have buttons cluttering the window and the way the keyboard/mouse works is really useful. Simple and yet so many get it wrong.

Cool Edit Pro - I haven't tried SoundForge but this is a really great audio editor. I think it hasn't been called that for years and is called Audigy these days.

Firefox - My only complaint is the crappy download manager but there is probably an extension to fix it somewhere.

XNews - best newsgroup reader I've ever seen (you know, Usenet, part of the Internet...before your days, son...kind of like a bulletin board/forum). Again, so many get this, which should be simple, so wrong.

I gotta give it up for the many great text editors out there. This also should be simple and I think after decades we finally know how to get it right.
 

Guybrush

Dittohead
Pitchfork is an excellent pitchshift plug-in for Winamp that I've been using for many years now. It has, I think, been superseded by newer programs that, among other things, has a "master tempo" feature (changing the tempo without changing the pitch - requires a good code for it not to sound like shit), but I still stick with it. It's my favourite software because it is free, bug-free (ehh, I think), and it prolongs those "Hallelujah!"-moments you have upon first hearing a great tune (because pitchshifting a tune slightly makes your ears, sort of, hear it anew).
 

swears

preppy-kei
I really like this: http://www.threechords.com/hammerhead/ts-404.shtml

Really basic early softsynth with a crummy 16 note sequencer, I love the rawness and the weirdness of some of the sounds. Fun to mess around with and really rewarding if you put the time in, although you'll need some sort of wave recorder/editor to actually be able to make a tune with it. I still prefer this to other, more advanced softsynths.
It's a totally stand alone program, so I would recommend it to non-musicians interested in making tunes or even just odd noises.
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
I loved Word 5.1 on the Mac. That was a really neat bit of software.

I used to live inside Quark Xpress when I was a journalist and really adored V3.1. I miss it, I really do... sadly my hooky version no longer wants to work.

Ableton Live is a delightful, addictive, beautifully task-oriented bit of software. Audio quality isn't quite A1 but it's so usable for so many things.

I do love Safari, even though it doesn't work with WordPress, even though some of it is counter-intuitive, like the way it handles bookmarks.

I really enjoyed MindMapper (on the PC) but I don't ctually use it that much. A theoretical piece of software.

I absolutely rely on Outlook on PC for my whole life, but it really doesn't work well enough. Navigation through folders is clunky, archived mail sets are impossible to integrate, back up is very hard... but I'm stuck now.

I've grown to hate Acrobat on both PC and Mac. It seems terribly bloated, very unstable, and once put my PC laptop out of action for a week. I prefer Preview on the Mac - at least it works, isn't always carking out, and Preview has better navigation.

All the Words on Mac since 5.1 have been awful - in fact I much prefer Office on a PC.
 

Martin Dust

Techno Zen Master
Goodstuff
Quark 3.1 and 6, DOS 3.1, Wordstar, Word 5 on a Classic Mac, Timeworks on the ST, Media100, Final Cut, Cubase, Ableton, Soundforge, Pagemaker.

Bad
Office, Outlook, Designworks, Freehand
 

Oss

Member
As far as music sw goes, Max/MSP and Pure Data are both totally fantastic. Pure Data is free. Max is around $500. It is fancier, with a much nicer interface, but the sound quality of both is really excellent. And they can do just about anything you can think of, it's really inspiring and offers shitloads of new ways to compose. Another really great thing about Max/PD is that you can forget about ultra fancy/too specific-sounding and boring VST plug-ins and get great sounding stuff with often really simple set-ups.
 

gek-opel

entered apprentice
Will anyone stand up for Microsoft at all? Are they little better than anti-competitive purveyors of obese-bloatware whose only decent products are bought off lesser companies? {im checking out Pure Data right now... sounds excellent if in all liklihood impossible to programme...}
 
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Oss

Member
Pure Data doc folder includes control, audio and fft examples. My advice is to go through audio or fft exmpls first, just to mess with parameters and hear what happens. Then go through all control examples, to learn what's what. That should get you started (if you find it worth yr time. I did.)
 

bassnation

the abyss
Will anyone stand up for Microsoft at all? Are they little better than anti-competitive purveyors of obese-bloatware whose only decent products are bought off lesser companies? {im checking out Pure Data right now... sounds excellent if in all liklihood impossible to programme...}

note that all the people dissing ms are heavy mac users.

i'm more in the (solaris, aix, linux) unix world personally. as an engineer, the things i find beautiful are scalability, performance, low verbosity in code, the beauty of the algorithim rather than a sculpted user interface - but i also accept i am not a typical computer user. (many of the applications i use / write for my job don't have any kind of UI at all, beyond the command line)

whether people like it or not, ms is a massive success because they are good at UI design. for all the mac users moaning about windows crashing every day, the UI is shit - you are really five years out of date. XP is stable and it doesn't look or feel that bad at all.

and i'd just like to make the point that its not just windows thats built on legacy code - abandoning legacy code can sometimes mean burning your bridges with the past - something that plenty of mac users are moaning about as regards compatibility with the new intel-based macs. microsoft has a lot of corporate users to keep happy - unlike apple.

having said that i am buying one of the damn things soon so don't put me down as an apple hater. just think it should be more balanced.

also people bigging up ableton - its kind of weird to use it on a pc as they don't use right click context menus - shabby conversion from its mac incarnation imo. although the pc version performs better, for some bizarre reason.
 
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