> It's about 127k lines of C++ (not counting libraries written by others)
I admire and respect you for that. Thank you really for building SumatraPDF.
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
131–140 of 175 posts
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#132SumatraPDF 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…
Any chance Sumatra PDF will support forms in PDFs any time soon?
Great software by the way, I was blown away by the speed of loading a pdf file. I never had such a fast PDF reader up until I started using Sumatra since last year.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#133Another thank you shout out for @kjksf. Long live SumatraPDF!
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I don't think it has anything to do with monopolies. Just look around you, in the physical world. It's increasingly hard to get quality anything - quality clothes, quality tools, quality foods. So many commodities - the opposite of monopoly - end up optimized to the point of being junk.
I suppose in a perfect theoretical world - the one inhabited by frictionless spherical vacuums in a cow - this wouldn't be the case; market competition would allow people valuing quality to pay for it, and get quality things. The real world, unfortunately, is full of friction, and full of limits.
An example phenomenon, that seems to commonly occur in all kinds of product categories, is the self-segregation of vendors into two groups: the cheap vendors, and the premium vendors. Every vendor serving the "middle" - selling high quality products for a reasonable price - has two obvious ways to improve their margins: move "down" a little bit, by cutting on quality to lower their costs and pocket the difference, or go "up" a little, by improving quality further and increasing the price even more, again pocketing the difference. Here's what happens when each vendors makes such step, either "up" or "down":
- Some customers prefer to take the step "down", some others are happy to go "up", but this isn't symmetrical - at any point, a subset of customers is hitting its spending limits, in the sense of marginal price increase not being worth the marginal quality improvement. Those customers will migrate "down".
- Customers preferentially migrating "down" means the slightly lower quality product gets cheaper (economies of scale), while the vendors of the slightly higher quality product need to raise prices even more, to compensate.
- Profits of each of the vendors improve - both of those going "up" and "down" - but then, competitors follow and the extra margin evaporates.
- As a result, companies end up being somewhat locked in their choice - trying to reverse it will only risk getting outcompeted.
Now, iterate that several times, and you can see how the market starts splitting into two clusters. Unfortunately, because the market size (number of likely customers) is limited, trying to keep serving the "middle" only means you watch your customer base evaporate. Eventually, the profits available in the middle are not enough to recoup fixed costs, at which point the whole quality class itself evaporates. Without it, new customers have no choice - it's either the shitty version or the overpriced version, because the good deal is no longer on the market.
Note that there are no monopolies in sight in this scenario - all it takes is to have a finite population and fixed costs, and over time, the market will segregate into a cluster of maximally shitty versions of a product, and a cluster of exclusive (or certified/supported industrial use versions) but expensive versions of it.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#135[dead]
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#136I 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…
> but paradoxically the more professional an open source site looks, the more I assume there's going to be a catch I hate to admit this, but I feel the same way when it comes to programmers themselves. I've tried very, very hard to be mindful of this in an effort to correct it, but I still have this gut feeling when I encounter a fellow programmer with the general put-together-ness of someone in the C-suite. What mak…
I’m far from cover-of-GQ but I did wear a suit every day for a few years to a programming job. Maybe it’s the punk in me but when every person in the company, including the C suite, dressed in a t-shirt and jeans or sweats I felt the need to be a little counter culture. Honestly it was an insightful experiment in biases, seeing how different people treated me (such as your admission) based on my clothes alone.
… and I have no trouble writing fizz buzz.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but paradoxically the more professional an open source site looks, the more I assume there's going to be a catch I hate to admit this, but I feel the same way when it comes to programmers themselves. I've tried very, very hard to be mindful of this in an effort to correct it, but I still have this gut feeling when I encounter a fellow programmer with the general put-together-ness of someone in the C-suite. What mak…
Likewise, I'd never trust a software engineer in a suit, unless it's for a project written in Java or COBOL. Nor a sysadmin that isn't wearing black, running Linux and/or listening to metal. Unless they have a white beard, then you know they have been around for a while. (Just partially serious here, don't read too much into it. But you know it's true.)
Much like some people like wearing a nice watch, pants, etc, I like wearing a nicely cut suit or jacket. Is that really any different to people wearing a comfortable pair of jeans? And paradoxically, I have carried server equipment wearing an italian suit, whilst others were bemoaning dust getting on their levis jeans...
So please, please don't judge a book by it's cover. Actions speak louder.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#138SumatraPDF 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…
Thank you for SumatraPDF. I love that it's faster than any other PDF/ebook viewer I tried. I hate that EPUB content doesn't flow fluidly, which IMO defeats the purpose of the format, and that there is no way to customize its look in the advanced settings, because of which I couldn't use it to read ebooks.
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#139Wow, someone that didn't use Electron for writing desktop apps? Focus on speed and simplicity? Basically every app should be like this.
Funnily, more than a few Electron apps use SumatraPDF under the hood:
https://github.com/artiebits/pdf-to-printer/blob/master/src/...
Re: Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
#140SumatraPDF 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…
Thank you for your work, really appreciate the app and have it on every device I run.