I liked this essay a lot. Fits with my philosophy as well, although I don't use the apps he uses (except Ulysses):

"Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why."

https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/

"Unbloat" - a word new to me, but one which promises to be useful (and which also led me to discover another word with potential: "debloat"). Thank you.

What I so disliked about Windows taking over is that I no longer had supported apps in MS DOS. I used the blazingly fast XyWrite IV for word processing, MaxThink and GrandView for outlining, Symantec's Q&A for storing structured data, and askSam for freeform data.

"Performant" was new to me, too. Also new to Merriam-Webster, but I see it has some traction as jargon.

Unbloat or debloat both convey meaning very performantly, I think.


Hugh wrote:

"Unbloat" - a word new to me, but one which promises to be useful (and
which also led me to discover another word with potential: "debloat").
Thank you.

Jeffery Smith wrote:

What I so disliked about Windows taking over is that I no longer had supported apps in MS DOS. I used the blazingly fast XyWrite IV for word processing, MaxThink and GrandView for outlining, Symantec's Q&A for storing structured data, and askSam for freeform data.

I can't say for these specific ones (except GrandView), but some MS DOS apps can still run under Windows 10:
https://www.techradar.com/how-to/how-to-run-old-dos-programs-in-windows-10
GrandView in Windows thread here: https://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/6291/0/grandview-for-windows-v1

Much less can be said about Apple and it's ever changing and incompatible processors... Motorola > PowerPC > Intel x86 and soon perhaps ARM. Each time users had to buy new software.

Pierre

Now that I've been flippant, there is something I've been thinking about sort of along this topic.

I wrote the outline for a short story I think I'll write, and instead of my usual hierarchy, I made myself stick to just three entries in the outline - Beginning, Middle, and End.

A couple of comments and ideas went in subtopics below those, but they were intended to be temporary. I wanted to stick to the three phases of the story.

I generally outline in OmniOutliner. The notes style is set to full black, 14 point,

Debloating my outlining style helped quite a bit.

One of the Devonthink support folks once said in an email that it's OK to use complex tools for simple solutions. For instance, a lot of my use for DT is as a sync bucket, or as analog for Scrivener.

He said that kind of use was like what he thinks of Corvettes. They are great for standing start dashes to 180 in a few seconds, but they are also just fine at 20 in a school zone.

Yes!!! Indeed fast software is the best software. Thanks for the link.

I'm happy anytime anyone recognizes this, writes about it, talks about it. I'm sad that almost everything out there is so slow. Almost all software, all apps, all websites... slow. It's sad that computers a billion times faster do stuff slower... in the movies

Video games are fast. Can regular software be made in a video game engine so that it's faster?

The "photos" app on most phones is pretty impressive - fast scrolling of hundreds/thousands of thumbnails, and snappy filtering.

Amontillado wrote:

"Performant" was new to me, too. Also new to Merriam-Webster, but I see
it has some traction as jargon.

Unbloat or debloat both convey meaning very performantly, I think.


Hugh wrote:
"Unbloat" - a word new to me, but one which promises to be useful (and
>which also led me to discover another word with potential: "debloat").
>Thank you.

:)

As a professional software developer for over 30 years, it shocks me how bloated a lot of modern software is. I would be ashamed to write bloatware like that. Do these developers know what a profiler is? Maybe their bosses don't care?

The Hyper Plan executable is about 2 MB. With various third party libraries and the Visual C++ redistributable, it compressed to about 20MB (less on Mac).

I once bought an HP Colour printer and it proceeded to load a staggering amount of software onto my PC. This software was using almost all the CPU. God knows what it was doing. It totally bought the PC its knees and I had to uninstall to make the PC usable. I've never bought any HP stuff since.

--
Andy Brice
http://www.hyperplan.com

The link was great, really enjoyed reading the article.

The fact that speed is important is attested to everyone who purchases a new computer/device, because it has become to "slow" (a relative term). I also wonder whether the increase of higher level languages and frameworks invariably require more processing power in what they produce. The article linked to an interesting debate on Electron apps. It did make me think wider about software in general. The faster, cleaner, and more secure you want your software the more it's going to cost you. You only need to look at embedded systems in a camera as opposed to an airplane. It could be the reason why people are buying software that does one thing well and ditching software that is feature rich, but slowed by that richness. To make an app do one thing well with speed is less of a problem than to make a feature rich app that does everything well. I can easily see that the cost could be prohibitive. How much would it cost evernote to totally rewrite their app for every platform rather than patch it up. I can also see why Java is so popular as its code once run everywhere, but the experience tends to be less than pleasant in my experience.

In the end software; as in every other area of life; is driven by cost and profit. We no longer live in a world where people in general are proud of their work.

Here is Mark Bernstein's take on the speed discussion: https://www.markbernstein.org/Jul19/TheNeedForSpeedapartialdis.html

Andy Brice wrote:
As a professional software developer for over 30 years, it shocks me how
bloated a lot of modern software is. I would be ashamed to write
bloatware like that. Do these developers know what a profiler is? Maybe
their bosses don't care?

As an end user, thank you!

It's really frustrating to remember using software 15 years ago that was more responsive than today, knowing the hardware is infinitely faster. Now most 'apps' are slow to load and pause often...I assume they are phoning home to the mother ship for ads, tracking, software updates, syncing, whatever.

There seems to be a Moore's law about software bloat that cancels out Moore's law for CPU power. My Dad always told me that no matter how big of a tackle box you get, that your existing collection of fishing stuff WILL fill it up. Our wardrobe increases with our closet sizes, and our general stuff increases with home size as the ratio of how much of it is useful day-to-day decreases. Speed and storage increases are just more rooms in a house for software engineers to stash more crap that is only tangentially related to the core purpose of the software.

I will never forget my first smartphone, a Palm Treo 650. As an 'extended brain' where I want to QUICKLY jot a note, appointment, todo, grocery item etc....I've never used something faster or more reliable. Of course I wouldn't trade my Android for it today, but I do miss that snappiness several times a day.

I read the Craig Mod piece, and a lot of blogosphere and commentariat responses, and came away thinking "yes, but...". Mod focuses his ire at a bundle of software that are completely unrelated in intent and audience. Mod's article seems written more to get ghits and page views than to offer a constructive assessment of the state of the art.

Sure, no one likes unpleasant and confusing software. (Without naming names, some of the developers who come onto this forum to flog their work have some pretty unintuitive stuff on offer.) But before trying, or buying, software it's a good idea to have a clue about what it does and why someone would want to own it.

In recent been lucky to have the gelt to buy hardware above the median point of processing power, and sometimes more. With that, "speed" (which I suppose means responsiveness more than anything) has never been an issue. I buy a lot of software, because I like to CRIMP and I like independent developers, since I work in related fields. Maybe 10% of the time I delete something because it doesn't cut it -- but not because of speed. Usually because the developer seems to have misunderstood what someone in my line of work needs.

I still fondly remember how fast MORE felt when it first came out.

Mark Bernstein's interesting take on speed also links to an interesting discussion of Twine, the open-source hypertext authoring tool.

http://chrisklimas.com/twine-past-present-future/

Twine 2.0 itself can be found here: http://twinery.org (I have to say, this is one of the neatest website ideas I've seen for a long time).

Cheers,
Bill

Sorry, somewhat ambiguous. Twine is neat, but the Twinery website is possibly even neater!