Jeff Atwood had an interesting post about software spoilage, in which he quotes PC World’s list of no-longer-good-too-bloated applications which includes Windows Media Player 11.
Are they kidding? WMP11 is a LOT better than WMP 9 and 10. It has better organization, and the fact that I can do instant filtering on albums, genres, artists, songs, and anything else is a killer feature. I’ve got about 16,000 tracks, mostly classical and soundtrack. I couldn’t live without WMP11’s organizational and filtering capabilities. Sure, it’s big, but I don’t notice a slowdown.
I do agree about other things in the list. Paint Shop Pro has definitely become much too big. What was attractive about it was its small size and lack of features, which made it approachable. Nowadays, I use Paint.Net. Simple, open-source, easy to use.
Technorati Tags: software , Windows Media Player , bloat
I completely agree: the instant search and the library are awesome features. Windows Media Player really is one of few examples of applications that become better and better at each new release (I only miss the title of the track when in Album Cover visualization mode… but anyway).
Speaking of small but great software, I think Irfan View too deserves to be mentioned. It’s one of the lightest image viewers around, but is packed with some great features (for instance basic editing or batch file renaming and conversion). By the way, I think it has some of the best resizing algorithms I ever used.