From: David Champion Date: 19:48 on 30 Aug 2004 Subject: Stuffit Expander. 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. The only good thing about Stuffit, *ever*, is that it gave Aladdin the money to buy and maintain ghostscript.
From: peter (Peter da Silva) Date: 20:44 on 30 Aug 2004 Subject: Re: Stuffit Expander. > 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 10:26 on 16 Apr 2008 by mariachi