Mac OS, IOS Updates

Stocks A to Z
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A few updates today…

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I was much happier when the OS was in the single digits.

Featuritis
Featuritis
Featuritis

Featuritis (also called creeping featurism) is the ongoing tendency to add too many features to a product or software with each new release. [1]

What Causes It?

  • Well-meaning designers who want to add extra value.
  • Enthusiastic users asking for more options.
  • The belief that more choices automatically make a product better. [1]

Common Problems

  • Complexity: The product becomes hard to use.
  • Overwhelming design: Beginners feel lost and confused.
  • Lost focus: The core purpose of the tool gets buried under extras. [1]

The Captain

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And also, the feeling that you need to make use of - and justify - the constantly increasing speed and power of the underlying silicon hardware.

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Featuritis.

I recently attempted to recover my PhD thesis files into some format that would be readable on a modern word processor. At the time I wrote it, I rejected going with LaTeX and its typesetting codes and decided to write the whole thing in Microsoft Word. I thought that that would be the more modern thing to do.

Word at the time was Microsoft Word 5.1, which those of us who lived through those times to today might consider the perfect word processor. In comparison to Word today, it was lean and fast and had many of the features we use most today, it could run on ancient hardware and Classic Mac OS, and almost no bloat. At least compared to today. Of course, Word and other MS Office products kept accumulating bloat to get to where we are today.

Around the same time, there was a word processor that I also liked called WriteNow. It was also lean, kind of like MS Word at the time, but it was also faster (IMO) than MacWrite. In many ways, I thought it was the best word processor of its time. I thought the developers (T/maker) focused more on performance (e.g. handling large documents quickly) than on features.

Whatever I thought, WriteNow disappeared, and MS Word lives with us today.

I think the reason featuritis is inevitable is because a user can try to ignore extra features, but an application that tries to be bare bones, in comparison, may still lack features that many users would prefer to have. So, developers decide that it’s better to provide a lot of features up front rather than provide add-ons later.

-awlabrador

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As does LaTeX, now with more features!

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Yes, I use Overleaf for journal papers. On the other hand, conferences these days often provide templates for Word or Google Docs or something easier. I even submit funding applications with .pdf files.

I’ll admit Overleaf is way, way better than some of the old applications I used to use (e.g. TeXshop) even when they were GUI front-ends to the command line TeX or LaTeX tools. If you have to use LaTeX, I can’t imagine doing anything but Overleaf these days.

But even with tools like Overleaf’s table builder and such, I still find myself having to look up embedded formatting commands and debugging them. It’s maddening. It’s stuff like that that pushed me to use Word for my thesis decades ago, and I use Overleaf/LaTeX only when required for some reason.

-awlabrador

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