Please see the post I was responding to, where the user was lamenting some hypothetical future in which Scrivener has ‘no need’ to add anything more, presumably because Perfection had already been achieved.
Katherine
Ah. I pretty much ignore that user’s posts these days.
Holy crappers, this discussion is way too intensive for the casual user like myself of this forum…so I’m going keep my comments short and simple in the hopes that others speak more; clearly a lot of people are passionate about this topic one way or another.
I guess to help streamline this discussion let us all come to some understanding of the word ‘bloat’. What qualifies as bloat? Is that even the right word for what we are all arguing about? Has bloat come to mean differently to different people?
That’s actually a GREAT question. To me, software bloat is something that: actively interferes with what I am trying to do (although I don’t use scriptwriting mode, forex, to me that is not bloat because I know other people use it extensively but it doesn’t get in my way at all); drags in additional third-party code that I don’t need/want in such a way that it interferes with other applications on my system; causes UX clutter that makes it hard to find and use features I do like; or otherwise affects the stability of the system.
I agree. Scrivener did everything need and want it to do many versions ago. It contains a great many features that I don’t use but which don’t bother me at all because they’re hidden away in the menu system where they do no harm, or are removable from the very customisable toolbars / layouts.
I don’t know if this is part of some fundamental design standard that LL adheres to, but it seems to me that Scriv tends to include features that are either useful to pretty much everyone, or completely transparent to those that don’t use them. Any feature that you can hide can’t be considered bloat (unless – to go back to one of yosimiti’s original hippopotheses – it’s mere existence puts strain on the ol’ chipset).
Mr K,
I think he’s talking about us.
Seems there are in fact two concepts being discussed: complexity versus bloat. Two examples immediately come to mind. Photoshop, for instance, is a very large, very complex program. People devote their entire careers to mastering PS and still learn new things about the software. It is resource-intensive, but that has a lot to do with the file sizes it has to handle. And Adobe has done a reasonably good job of servicing the code base as well as maintaining/updating features or chucking them. Still, there are many longtime PS users who feel it has become bloated.
Quicken, OTOH, is the poster child for bloatware. An ancient, sprawling code base on which dubious feature after dubious feature has been piled like a wobbly Jenga tower, even as previous features still don’t work correctly years after being introduced; an ugly UI, a counter-intuitive UX; poltergeist bugginess, and not uncommon fatal crashes which wipe out acres of a user’s most sensitive data.
O.T. and of little consequence (the pedantic afflatus is upon me): your join date and number of posts actually mark you as a pretty prolific user of this forum.
It’s all relative sir. I consider myself a fledgling compared to some of these old timers.
But let’s get back to bloating please…
Would love to hear your answer since you raised the Q.
the ‘extension’ idea was offered as a means to deal with ‘bloat’ in a different way; but I admit it’s problematic, considering.
I guess I was trying to ‘have the bloat’ without the ‘bloat’ if you catch my drift. Alas, I’ll admit when I’m off, which I was.
De-bloat de bloat: nano + markdown => pandoc => ePub. Salt, season, & distribute.
OH! Scrivener? Repository & Reference.
Your points are well-taken. But there is still a widespread misconception, particularly among users of the U------- software, that Scrivener requires users to mess with final output format during composition. Having Real Styles will only reinforce this error.
That said, it does seem to have some valuable utility in your use case (and doubtless others) so I will shut up about it.
From the urban dictionary:
bloatware
A piece of software, hardware or website that attempts to do too much and becomes utterly useless for users. An example of bloatware would be a word processing application that also tries to be your page layout program, drawing tool, and web browser; absorbing half your hard drive and all your RAM in the process.
Mind you guys, this isn’t my definition per se; I’m just putting it out there.
Bloat in software is incredibly relative to the user. I was long time ago a user of Opera (started around 1999), a web browser which took a very opinionated view of the user interface. It came with all sorts of additions built-in: what is now called a tabbed interface, though it actually had a full MDI interface which was much more powerful, mouse gestures, per-site preferences, a sidebar, etc. etc. — basically lots of features. I found all those tools exceptionally useful, and as a Science student took great pride when I could use Opera like a ninja and pull multiple data sources much more quickly and efficiently than others. Opera users were a passionate bunch, and we loved the features that were bundled. However Opera was constantly criticised as being “bloated”. You could easily hide the features, but for some users the “bloat” was conceptual: even though Opera was no slower (indeed the user could be much faster with gestures, solid keyboard control etc), took no more memory etc. many people would refuse to use it.
The analogy I want to make is that even if you have infinite computing resource, and a user interface that can streamline features, some people will still complain Scrivener is “bloated”. That is, to my mind, ridiculous; but their point of view is as valid to them as my point of view is to me. Bloat is metaphysical!
Personally I can’t wait for Scrivener 3. Even though I use MMD for all my writing (thus don’t fuss with styling my text for output at all), I neverthless think a better Styles system is going to be a super useful update for many Scrivener users. I’m very much looking forward to the revamped/unified meta-data/bookmarks/references system which is quite complex in Scrivener at present. And I do want (unrationally) access to the latest APIs, more bits and (rationally) a non-buggy PDF system. Bring it on!!!
I have to say I agree with you on that.
Mark
Straight from the OED (Oxford English Dictionary Online):
Bloatware:
Software that requires an excessive amount of disk space or memory, typically due to the repeated addition of new features over successive versions.
1991 Businessweek 30 Sept. 100/1 Worse, they’ll be stuck with poor applications programs—what he calls ‘bloatware’.
1998 N.Y. Times 3 Dec. d3/5 As long as software developers keep making bloatware, you will need a bigger hard drive.
2011 Lifehacker (Nexis) 2 Feb. I hate syncing with the bloatware that is iTunes.
I think we can all agree that the OED is a tad bit skimpy on the full ramifications of the word’s ultimate meaning!
I understand all but the “nano” reference. To what (software?) are you referring? Inquiring minds want to know…
Oh. A Windows editor. Nevermind.
Oh, so emacs?