Smart Software

Computer Magazines

Before there were blogs and the web, I used to be an avid reader of magazines, subscribing to as many as thirteen in the early 1990s, many of them in computer programming, particularly the less popular, more technical magazines that I could not read in the libraries.

Eric Sink noted two years ago that computer magazines were dying, reflecting a larger trend in which nearly all paper media is declining amidst the technology boom.

Dr. Dobbs Journal, one of my early subscriptions, appears to be the latest developer magazine to disappear. I subscribed to about three different magazines on C/C++ programming including C++ Report and C/C++ User Journal, but it doesn't appear that any of them are still around. Byte went out of print fairly early, and Software Development magazine disappeared.

Microsoft System Journal still survives in the name of MSDN magazine from a merger with MIND magazine, but as Microsoft's official magazine for announcing new technologies, its future is guaranteed.

Alternative Search Engines

My latest finds include a number of e-book and document search engines that have been able to serve up information that even Google can't produce. These include scribd.com and docstoc.com and some e-book search engines, which feature all sorts of user uploaded documents.

The web is full of every imaginable hidden resources. A la rule 34, there seems to be almost nothing you cannot find in the web. Simply imagine a resource or search engine, then use Google to locate it.

Smart Software Should Get Out Of Your Way

Nick Bradbury, author of several successful software products, writes that "Smart Software Should Get Out of Your Way."

If you believe the tech pundits, “smart” software should predict what we’ll do so it can perform the next action faster.  “Smart” software should automatically correct our mistakes.  And “smart” software should adjust its user interface based on the features we’ve used in the past.

Sounds nice enough, but I’ve rarely seen software do these things without causing even more frustration than it attempts to solve.  It ends up being less like a helpful coworker and more like that annoying braniac every office is plagued with who constantly interrupts you with advice on working smarter by doing things his way.

The trouble with existing "smart" software is that they rarely incorporate genuine smarts. Rarely is there any actual intelligence underneath the actions, but rather a set of crude heuristics like pattern matching.

At the low end of the scale is Windows Explorer, for instance, with the lengthy pre-scans that occur when inserting a flash drive or performing a file operation: A single picture among diverse files selects the Picture view with a "Date Taken" column in the folder, for instance. Slightly better is Microsoft Word, which all too often misses with its "Auto" features, which are based on raw document text. Towards the higher end of the scale is the Visual Studio IDE, which maintains a dynamic internal representation of the code base. Even higher along the scale are products like JetBrain's Resharper, which incorporates substantial code analysis.

Then he seems to take a dig on me.

We all know that guy – he’s textbook smart but socially inept.  Which is a good description of much of today’s software.