Digging into PlantStudio, a bit late
pketh.org
pketh.org
> Perhaps it comes down to this: indirectly, our own personal benefit for writing PlantStudio software and our other projects includes all the other wonderful free stuff on the internet, and it would cost us trillions of dollars if we had to pay for the creation of all that diversity ourselves. We don't mind using guilt to effect change :-) but this time, with products under free license, it will be guilt to go do something positive in the world to pass on the gift, rather than a one-for-one exchange with us.
That's a wonderful sentiment from the humans who put a lot of effort into building this software (and eventually decided to give it away).
Word 97 is 5MB and it starts instantly. I mean there is no perceptible delay whatsoever. And it starts fully rendered and fully interactive. Same goes for Excel.
They do everything I need, and they do it better than the new ones.
The strangest thing is that while new software continues to get worse, old software continues to get better (it runs faster and faster).
It's true that software in general have grown in complexity. Some software pull giant trees of dependencies, because they can. As teams grow and time passes, mistakes are made...
I am increasingly put off by the current user interfaces which are based on modern, flat, designs, and tailored for users that don't need a lot of settings. All these exciting stuff from earlier days is omitted. I get that it looks better and works better for most of the people, but software just lost the excitement it once had for me. (back in the day, everything was better, haha)
I looked long and hard for something like this for Bonsai. I eventually found a Japanese app, but I'm yet to put in the effort to get it running. I don't think it worked in Whisky so I need to go deeper. https://www.jfp.co.jp/bonsai_dl/
I love that this silly app had a "Plant Wizard" with 10 steps and a progress bar with icons. That's really good UI design.
I don't know if there's any comfy GUI frontends for it on Linux, but back in the day I just ran `wine installer.exe` and it ended up in my distro's app launcher.
What does "aesthetic" mean to you?
Definition 1-c:
> pleasing in appearance : attractive
Much of today's software is going to be nothing more than a memory 22 years from now, after their authors run out of funding and they turn down the saas infrastructure that they shoehorned into it for that sweet, sweet recurring income. And more likely than not, we'll still be able to run this program from 2002, in 2046.