March 10, 2003

What's really important in software development?  To me, it's making software that people want to use.  That's what I've always wanted to do. Funny thing about programmers, though, is often that's not what's important.  What's important is the elegance of the algorithm, or the internal redesign that won't have any visible external consequence (hey I've been guilty of that one). People praise Apple for the software they've written but you know, a lot of what they've done right wasn't the underlying guts (though with OS X they finally have the guts right); they understood that the side of the software that the processor executes isn't as important as the side that the user sees. It's amazing the number of software projects that could benefit greatly from a fresh set of eyes to come in and say "how do I use this feature?", listen to the answer, and then come up with a better way.  It's also a little depressing how infrequently it happens.     1:27:49 PM    comment []

MapX Obsolete A useful tool I wrote, MapX, is now obsolete.  Everquest now has a built-in mapping tool in the Legacy of Ykesha expansion, that does basically what MapX did, but it's integrated into the game.  There are converters at www.eq-tools.com that will convert the ShowEQ / MapX style of maps into LoY maps. This is how software works:  Tools are written to do things that other pieces of software don't do, and then when the other software is updated, the tool is obsolete.  Of course, when this happened to Stacker, or QEMM, or pretty much any other company that makes money writing Windows utilities, it's a big deal. 1:17:47 PM    comment []