Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!enea!tut!santra!jmunkki
From: jmunkki@santra.UUCP (Juri Munkki)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Big Disks  &  NO AU/X is NOT vapourware!!!
Message-ID: <10037@santra.UUCP>
Date: 29 Jan 88 10:41:56 GMT
References: <273@afit-ab.arpa> <76000103@uiucdcsp> <1543@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: jmunkki@santra.UUCP (Juri Munkki)
Organization: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 26

In article <1543@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> buzz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Mahboud Zabetian) writes:
>But there is one thing I am wondering.  Will the advent of larger floppies and
>greater memory prevent people from writing shorter more efficient programs?  
>Will there be an outpour of sloppy algorithms?

A lot of current programs show the lack of good and compact design. If
programs were thought out better, the same functionality could be achieved
with half the "features", twice the speed and half the size.

PixelPaint is amazingly slow and uses a lot more memory than it would.
It is also very slow in loading and saving the pictures. I assume it
doesn't even do any packing (I get savings of well over 50% with stuffit).
Image Studio is very well done: it's fast, has a lot of interesting
functions (most of which are due to it's open architecture), and it's
half the size of pixel paint. Image Studio also seems to know how to use
fast SCSI disks for extra memory.

Software designers should start designing "slots" into their applications.
HyperCard and SoundWave have software slots. I'm designing a piece of
software that's mostly empty space that can be filled by anyone with moderate
programming skills.


Juri Munkki
jmunkki@santra.hut.fi
jmunkki@fingate.bitnet