Replacing your favourite applications

I don’t usually like replacing applications I’ve been using for awhile. I get comfortable with them, learn their quirks and have no desire to start that entire process again. However there comes a time when an app you’ve been using for awhile is no longer making the grade or is being out perfomed by another application. At this point you may as well leave your comfort zone and see what else is available on the market for your applications.

Winamp - Has been my favourite audio application for some years now, but currently it seems to be slow, unstable and sluggish. I did like that it was free and could be extended by plugins, but it the last couple of builds have seemed to taken hits performance wise.

Replacement: Musik Cube – I stumbled across Musik Cube this morning when Winamp crashed for the fourth time. Musik cube is very light, fast and does everything you’d expect out of the box. It also supports plugins and the media keys on my keyboard work straight away with no tinkering.

Website: http://www.musikcube.com/

AVG Anti-Virus – Recently forced it’s users to upgrade from version 7 to 8. I found version 8 to be slower, more bloated and the new link search feature destablised both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3 on my machine. I did like how they made the update screen less intrusive, but navigating the control panel was counter intuitive and difficult to find things. Link Search couldnt be disabled without AVG complaining that it wasnt working properly.

Replacement: Avast! – I was a big fan of avg so replacing it was no small task. After searchinig around for a bit I found alot of AVG users had migrated to Avast! I originally wanted to use ClamAV but unfortunately it lacks an on demand scanner, it’s planned for next release so I’ll check it out then. Out of the box I found Avast really irritating, but nearly all of the annoyances can be disabled or turned off. One thing I did notice was that if you’re doing work with files such as defragging you’ll need to disable Avast because it will slow it down considerably. Also the free edition requires manual registration when it expires which is a pain but I usually re-format every few months so that doesnt phase me too much.

Webpage: http://www.avast.com

That’s all the applications I’ve replaced for now, I’m looking into finding a really good general purpose editor for windows (all file types) syntax highlighting, code completion, line numbers, find and replace etc. If you know of one let me know.

We need to do something

About this ajaxy, flash based, media heavy direction the internet seems to be heading in. I mean shit, if there’s one thing a budget pc should be able to its browse the web and check email. Except its not that simple anymore, sites are so full of javascript and flash content it will throttle the CPU of most cheaper pcs making browsing the web a painful experience.

I think it’s a case of new technologies exploding out of sync with the browser clients who already have enough trouble trying to identically render pages, making the web developers designing pages smashing their heads against a wall (I speak mostly about IE here).

Another problem is the heavy use of out sourced developers, I mean yes they ARE cheap but they AREN’T necessarily GOOD. Most of these developers have never even read a book about interface design or even glanced at one, and to top it off alot of the time their code is messy, hacked together and flys as well as a brick with two sticks for wings.

I think most people can learn a thing or two about design principals from the more popular websites. YouTube, Google, Facebook, Flickr they all have something in common. They have a very minimalistic interface, now whether this is just to minimise the resources they use to speed up the serving of their content, or it could be that someone working at these places subscribes to the philosophy of “less is more”. A principal that everyone designing something should take on board.

The internet isn’t designed to be this media heavy, the strain on the infrastructure tells us this. Plus even Burners-Lee has come forward and said he didnt design the internet to be used in this manor. When will it stop? Will it get to the point where websites will actually have system requirements attached to the page to let you know that you need a top of the line graphics card just to look at today’s weather?

I will admit the current trend seems to be with development, lets just keep creating more and more layers to make programming easier and faster so we can lower costs and make more money.

Tell me this though? When you build the stack so high it eventually collapses and you’re stuck with a generation of programmers who only know how to drive the top most layer. Who rebuilds the stack for you?

Diablo 3

Just recently diablo 3 was announced and I’m quite excited. I once spent a stupidly long period of time playing this game without sleep so a sequel is just the thing my sleeping patterns need. So tonight I’ve got beer, a copy of diablo 2 and nothing but time, bring on it owwwnnnn