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Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

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Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#71
post #22

SumatraPDF, JPEGView [0], ShareX [1] are some great Windows open source softwares 0, https://github.com/sylikc/jpegview 1, https://getsharex.com/ ShareX is the nr1 software I wish was available under Linux. It does so much and perfectly. But I guess the whole X11/Wayland + different UI toolkits makes it complicated.

What features of ShareX do you use in practice? I came across it around the end of my Windows usage (a few years ago), and the only thing I really found useful was the Upload feature to get an Imgur (or similar) link.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#72
post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

Hey just wanted to say I use your app for all my reading, both school and recreational. Having a good desktop ebook interface has probably 5-10x how much I usually read over the last year--thanks for that!

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#73
post #35
post #2

I use SumatraPDF almost every day and I love it. It is very rare these days to have an application that is all of the following: - Small and fast - Hand-crafted for a particular platform - Not bloated with oddly specific UI menus and configuration settings It has one job and it does it very well. Thank you for it.

> It is very rare these days to have an application that is all of the following... Yep. On Windows there's: - IrfanView for image editing - foobar2000 for mp3s They've been on my "must have" install list for ~20 years. There's also Ditto for managing multiple clipboard entries. It's a good example of how a small open source tool with an optimized UI for 1 thing ends up being 100x better than the same feature MS trie…

For me the killer audio player was Winamp. I could hide the window and control everything via keyboard shortcuts.

It was the perfect program: completely invisible and yet completely functional.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think "reading PDFs without annoying the user" should be the first and golden goal. So much software in the modern era has horrible UX because the vendor's goals aren't aligned with the users' goals, where really the users' goals should be the only thing you care about as a company. At my $DAYJOB you could fire 80% of the R&D staff and refocus efforts onto what our users actually want, and we would probably…

> So much software in the modern era has horrible UX because the vendor's goals aren't aligned with the users' goals, where really the users' goals should be the only thing you care about as a company. That is the failure of market optimization nobody wants to talk about. It's an undeniable fact that competitive pressure and desire to make money incentivize people to solve other people's problems, leading to products…

That only happens when the market is a monopoly. Unfortunately, software, as it is now (i.e. almost completely uregulated), is super conducive to breeding monopolies.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#75
C++ leak trackers are surprisingly easy to implement. You create a custom allocator that has a per-type pointer to a pair of static ints (one for allocation count, one for total size).

When the allocator is statically instantiated, it adds itself to a global list.

Periodically (and at shutdown) log the top N heavy hitter allocations. In testing, assert there are no outstanding allocations in a static destructor.

The overhead of this is a couple of increments / decrements per allocation / free, so you can probably leave it on in production builds.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#76
post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

Hey just wanted to say I use your app for all my reading, both school and recreational. Having a good desktop ebook interface has probably 5-10x how much I usually read over the last year--thanks for that!

I only wish I could highlight ebooks

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#78
post #60

SumatraPDF author here. Glad people like the software for the reasons I thought the would (small, fast). If you haven't already: use Ctrl + K (Command Palette), a better way to operate the program than menus etc. Also I'll plug my latest project: I "ported" notepad2 to web: https://onlinetool.io/notepad2/ It's 85% done i.e. some functions are not implemented. On Chrome / Edge it can even read / write files from your…

please add viewing of 2 pages side by side.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#79

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 mo…

On the contrary. As a user, if I cannot see that the software makers are either a big, well backed project OR at least they are able to sustain themselves by selling premium versions etc, I avoid using it. Most of the projects that cannot fund themselves eventually get abandoned, leaving you, as the user, hanging.

After getting burned by that a few times, I learned that the only way to deal with it was to ensure that those who run a project will be able to justify putting time into it when the actual realities and responsibilities of life like career, family, children etc start raining down.

Its all fun and games when you are in college or fresh out of college and maintaining an open source project. But the time and effort put into it suddenly becomes difficult to justify when you have more responsibilities at work, or even further, a family to which you have to justify spending that time on that project.

Now, the assumption of open source community is that, when that happens, someone else will take over the project and it will just keep going on.

Except it rarely happens except for very large projects. The net is filled with abandoned projects. And even when someone takes over the project, there is no guarantee that the original vision and quality will be kept.

So its much better to make sure that every open source project has a way to fund itself and its developers by making money in some way.

Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)

#80
post #13

This 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!

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