3 ms·

Another form of user hostile software is software that is deliberately and inexplicably complex. I’m thinking specifically of ‘professional’ engineering tools.

by knolan 4y ago

Another form of user hostile software is software that is deliberately and inexplicably complex. I’m thinking specifically of ‘professional’ engineering tools. Simulation and CAD software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price, clunky user interfaces (often as a result of glueing together acquired software from a competitor) seemingly to up sell training, and awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!)

plonk 4y ago
> software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price In my experience, it's more laziness in the face of dependency hell. You integrate N big projects with different dependencies, hacked-together CMake modules with hard-coded paths and other mistakes, by copy-pasting several installs full of DLLs with different versions, and you end up with 10x the size you could have had. Or you can spend weeks on making a common build system with shared deps, and ship nothing of value in the meantime. Guess which one I'd rather show my manager. > awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!) For a workstation and an honest user maybe, but if you don't limit CPU cores, a user could simply deploy your software on a huge compute server and make it available to N users. Price per CPU makes sense in that case.
- knolan 4y ago
  Laziness is hostility for the user. They have a captive market and they see no need to make life easier. These companies have an effective monopoly so they don’t care. Companies like the MathWorks seem to make licensing straightforward. Even Adobe make it easy to push someone out of a session so you can get work done. Others make is a chore. Ansys, Solidworks etc have awful user experiences in comparison.

3 ms·

Another form of user hostile software is software that is deliberately and inexplicably complex. I’m thinking specifically of ‘professional’ engineering tools.

by knolan 4y ago

plonk 4y ago
> software that comes in a multi gigabyte installations, for no obvious reason other than to justify the price In my experience, it's more laziness in the face of dependency hell. You integrate N big projects with different dependencies, hacked-together CMake modules with hard-coded paths and other mistakes, by copy-pasting several installs full of DLLs with different versions, and you end up with 10x the size you could have had. Or you can spend weeks on making a common build system with shared deps, and ship nothing of value in the meantime. Guess which one I'd rather show my manager. > awkward licensing terms (one license per CPU core!) For a workstation and an honest user maybe, but if you don't limit CPU cores, a user could simply deploy your software on a huge compute server and make it available to N users. Price per CPU makes sense in that case.
- knolan 4y ago
  Laziness is hostility for the user. They have a captive market and they see no need to make life easier. These companies have an effective monopoly so they don’t care. Companies like the MathWorks seem to make licensing straightforward. Even Adobe make it easy to push someone out of a session so you can get work done. Others make is a chore. Ansys, Solidworks etc have awful user experiences in comparison.