Bearware
One book that I was reading these days is "The inmates are running the assylum", a computer book about design issues and problems in the actual software products, and it's discussion about bearware made me think about Protolib and it's actual implementation.
The point is, even than the program is more or less running and doing some of the things that I want it to do, it's really a kludge. I learned a lot about Visual Studio 2005, and generics, partial classes, object datasets and many other features of the tool, as well as many points in the .NET Framework, which is one of the objectives for this small project.
But, in the software product aspect, Protolib stinks. It's too near to a prototype and too far to the Librarian* to be something to be proud of. I feel embarrased each time I open it, thinking about the probable crashes accessing Amazon, the big pack of tweaks that I applied over time to work in my computer, the haywire user interface, and how difficult is to make sense on it if you are not the programmer. At the same time, a part of my mind shouts 'It's working! The code works, release, release, RELEASE!'.
During some weeks I was pondering the possibility of posting it here, or to show it to my friends to polish the roughest points, or starting again from scratch using the experience aquired, but I still haven't arrived to a conclussion. Until now, while reading this book.
My experience is that for a user, the program is the interface. I don't care about the inner workings of any program that I don't desperatly need and use (which I suppose will be the case with something so superfluous as Protolib, it's nice to have, but is not needed), if the installer complains too much about my computer, or if I can not find the feature that I want in less than five seconds, I just uninstall the program or start searching for another website "better done", or fetch the keyboard to write my own application, wich probably will be worst than any other option but at least will be mine and I will know and understand it.
At the moment, Protolib is just a prototype, and as in this book and others said, you must be ready to throw the first version, and that is what I will do. I will collect my notes, draw a little, and start again with a 'Blank solution' of Visual Studio 2005 (now in it's final version).
* The Librarian is a program mentioned in "Snowcrash", a SciFi novel by Neal Stephenson. This program collect information and prepare reports for the protagonist. When I read the book, I thought 'I NEED something like that!', but the only thing that I can do at the moment is only a toy like ProtoLib :)
The point is, even than the program is more or less running and doing some of the things that I want it to do, it's really a kludge. I learned a lot about Visual Studio 2005, and generics, partial classes, object datasets and many other features of the tool, as well as many points in the .NET Framework, which is one of the objectives for this small project.
But, in the software product aspect, Protolib stinks. It's too near to a prototype and too far to the Librarian* to be something to be proud of. I feel embarrased each time I open it, thinking about the probable crashes accessing Amazon, the big pack of tweaks that I applied over time to work in my computer, the haywire user interface, and how difficult is to make sense on it if you are not the programmer. At the same time, a part of my mind shouts 'It's working! The code works, release, release, RELEASE!'.
During some weeks I was pondering the possibility of posting it here, or to show it to my friends to polish the roughest points, or starting again from scratch using the experience aquired, but I still haven't arrived to a conclussion. Until now, while reading this book.
My experience is that for a user, the program is the interface. I don't care about the inner workings of any program that I don't desperatly need and use (which I suppose will be the case with something so superfluous as Protolib, it's nice to have, but is not needed), if the installer complains too much about my computer, or if I can not find the feature that I want in less than five seconds, I just uninstall the program or start searching for another website "better done", or fetch the keyboard to write my own application, wich probably will be worst than any other option but at least will be mine and I will know and understand it.
At the moment, Protolib is just a prototype, and as in this book and others said, you must be ready to throw the first version, and that is what I will do. I will collect my notes, draw a little, and start again with a 'Blank solution' of Visual Studio 2005 (now in it's final version).
* The Librarian is a program mentioned in "Snowcrash", a SciFi novel by Neal Stephenson. This program collect information and prepare reports for the protagonist. When I read the book, I thought 'I NEED something like that!', but the only thing that I can do at the moment is only a toy like ProtoLib :)
posted by Eduardo Shanahan at
2:19 p.m.
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