Re: Stuffit Expander.

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2004/08/30]

From: peter (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Stuffit Expander.
Date: 20:44 on 30 Aug 2004
> You know what I'm talking about. Asinine, misbegotten, throwback jar of
> bilge. What do we need this kind of blistering toesore for anyway, in
> this day? And stop stealing my focus.

Near as I can tell, writing compression or archiving code (and
encryption code, but that's another rant *) makes one completely
incapable of providing a sane GUI or even CLI. Aladdin Expander is
actually one of the less screwed up examples. Normally I'm in
agreement with the argument that commercial software tends to be
better at GUIs than the open source stuff, but damn.

Command line zoo, zip, etc... even when I was regularly using these
kinds of programs on *PM and *DOS I frequently couldn't remember
what the right options were to do fairly simple stuff without
double-checking the docs. And I regularly use sed, find, and Berkeley
ls!

WinZip... oh yes, when I double-click on a file the right thing to
do is list the file, and then when I immediately click "extract"
the right thing to do is present a dialog that, by default, does
nothing... because it defaults to "extract selected files".

Microsoft of course would like nothing better than to keep mere
mortals from ever opening .cab files.

At least Aladdin/Stuffit does something sane by default.

* Displaying an error message for a microsecond and closing the
window is NOT the way to tell me what's wrong with my SSH key file,
Mister Putty!

Generated at 22:00 on 02 Sep 2004 by mariachi 0.52