I agree with his points about treating it like commercial software (in terms of having a website/screenshots/etc) but paradoxically the more professional an open source site looks, the more I assume there's going to be a catch. When you find a utility which has a site that looks like Richard Stallman's website you breathe easily because it's unlikely there's going to be any time-limited trial version, subscription models, ads-in-application, etc.
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
11–20 of 175 posts
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#12[deleted]
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#13This makes for a quite compelling case relating to the Casey Muratori video around clean code that made the tech community rounds recently. The developer of SumatraPDF has rolled his own implementations for a lot of things in order to reduce bloat and it shows! The app is lightning fast and does its job perfectly. Wish we had more native projects like that!
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#14This makes for a quite compelling case relating to the Casey Muratori video around clean code that made the tech community rounds recently. The developer of SumatraPDF has rolled his own implementations for a lot of things in order to reduce bloat and it shows! The app is lightning fast and does its job perfectly. Wish we had more native projects like that!
100% agreed! I’ve switched go Sumatra PDF roughly 5 years ago, after Adobe Reader became just absurdly slow. It’s crazy how a hobbyist can make product that’s vastly better than a multibillion dollar company.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#15yes, I want to use this everywhere.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#16SumatraPDF is the best PDF reader for Windows
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#17> This comes back to Jeff Bezos' wisdom: there will never be a time when users want bloated and slow apps so being small and fast is a permanent advantage.
Did he share that with rest of the company or kept the knowledge to himself ?
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#18Didn't know that the SumatraPDF author had a blog, loved the read
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#19Been using SumatraPDF for probably a decade now and it’s always been great. Thanks, Chris!
If there’s one feature I’d absolutely love, because it’d let me delete Acrobat Reader again, it’d be digital signatures. Clients demanding that documents be digitally signed (but self-issued certs were ok?!) was the only reason I grudgingly reinstated it on one of my machines.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#20This makes for a quite compelling case relating to the Casey Muratori video around clean code that made the tech community rounds recently. The developer of SumatraPDF has rolled his own implementations for a lot of things in order to reduce bloat and it shows! The app is lightning fast and does its job perfectly. Wish we had more native projects like that!
100% agreed! I’ve switched go Sumatra PDF roughly 5 years ago, after Adobe Reader became just absurdly slow. It’s crazy how a hobbyist can make product that’s vastly better than a multibillion dollar company.
Adobe’s goals for Acrobat Reader are almost diametrically opposed to yours.