1–6 of 6 posts
Is there such a thing as the 'perfect' software?
Inspired by this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23803539
Honestly, it should be a built-in feature of macOS.
Sold as a personal bibliographic database, it is fully portable (on USB Stick) and works as a database, knowlegde store, document templating and generation tool. Much loved by users [1]
Features:
- Rock solid since 1995.
- Text based configuration with GUI tools.
- Simple model just define fields,records.
- Each record can have multiple parents/children.
- Automatic data entry forms with validation/spellchecking.
- Optional hand coded forms.
- Save part filled forms as templates.
- Every record full text indexed.
- Advanced search capabilities.
- Scripting - limited but functional.
- Multiple export formats, including "merge using text file" which can reference fields from parent(s) and children.
- Help file and manual.
The only weakness is the lack of basic language constructs within the scripting commands (I often have to create scripts on the fly to embed variables - then run them).
If the scripting commands could be exposed as an API, then this software would benefit greatly from retro-fitting Lua or Luajit.
[0] https://lhosborn.com/2019/06/11/idealist-still-going-strong/
It tells me what's wrong with my code, it's fast enough, it gives me these wonderful programs out of nowhere.