Do you remember Norton Utilities?...when it came on a floppy and you accessed it in Dos with a command prompt? Remember how simple and straight forward it was? How it just worked? It didn't walk the dog or do your dishes, it just fixed the hard drive. That wasn't enough for management and marketing. Over the years it grew bigger, slower, added 'features' that no one wanted or needed and eventually grew into a behemoth that caused more problems than it was supposed to fix. It got so bad that hackers had to write the 'Norton de-crapper" to get rid of it. Form antivirus to a firewall, it tried to do everything in order to maintain the cash flow and justify charging ever more for it. It's a horrible phenomena called "Feature creep" that has ruined many great (or at least good) programs. The legendary image viewer ACDSee was one such program ruined by shortsighted greed. They hit the sweet spot with version 3.1 (later called 'Classic'). It just looked at pictures...pure and simple. And it did it faster than ANY other program...a LOT faster. Even today it's the fastest image viewer available (I tested it against the latest Irfanview recently and yes, it's still the fastest). ACDSee Classic was endlessly configurable, usable, simple and FAST. I loved the ability to hold the 'ctrl' key in the thumbnail mode, pick the images I wanted, hit 'view' and scroll through the images with the scroll wheel. Pressing the scroll wheel would go from full screen to a windowed view and back again. Since digital came a long (I've been a professional photographer for 34 years now) I've always had ACDSee Classic open on my desktop. When I need to fix something I use Photoshop. To convert raw files I use C1Pro3.5. I use Portfolio to maintain my database, and of course ACDSee Classic to look at images quickly. The right tools for each job. Unfortunately they've ruined ACDSee with 'Feature Creep". It now tries to be and do EVERYTHING. It doesn't open images anywhere near as fast as the classic version, it's horribly over-complicated, and doesn't do anything nearly as well as the proper tools (Photoshop, Portfolio, C1Pro, Bibble etc). They've ruined it. While I (and pretty much every other photographer and graphic artist) I know still use the classic version, it's not aging well and has a few problems with WinXP.
"The point Bob!..what's the point to your tirade!"
The point is...Irfanview seems to be going the same route. Sometimes less is more. There are a million graphics programs around but none of them approach the simple usability and blinding speed of ACDSee Classic. I implore the developer(s) of Irfanview to maybe take a look at their direction of development. Do you want another 'do-it-all' that doesn't...?...
...or strive for elegant simplicity that just---plain---works. You couldn't do better than to emulate ACDSee Classic. Allow plug-ins if you must, but maintain the goal of something that puts speed, stability and usability above all else.
just some guy with a camera....
"The point Bob!..what's the point to your tirade!"
The point is...Irfanview seems to be going the same route. Sometimes less is more. There are a million graphics programs around but none of them approach the simple usability and blinding speed of ACDSee Classic. I implore the developer(s) of Irfanview to maybe take a look at their direction of development. Do you want another 'do-it-all' that doesn't...?...
...or strive for elegant simplicity that just---plain---works. You couldn't do better than to emulate ACDSee Classic. Allow plug-ins if you must, but maintain the goal of something that puts speed, stability and usability above all else.
just some guy with a camera....
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