The popular ebook reader, Stanza, has now been updated for iOS 5, but new owner Amazon says that this is the last update.
I stopped using Stanza, formerly my reader of choice, because it was unusable on iOS 5. In its place, I started to use Apple’s iBooks, which turns out to be a remarkably capable and polished reader. I’m downloading the new Stanza update, but I’m not sure I’ll go back to Stanza.
It’s always nice to see software get upgraded. It’s not so nice when tools you depend on get mysteriously lost in the process.
Take the excellent open-source video player VLC. One of the features I use constantly in my day job is the Information window, which lets you inspect a video file to see which codecs were used for the video and audio streams. Unfortunately, that feature mysteriously went missing some time around VLC 0.9: the window still comes up, but the relevant fields are blank. In addition to the latest greatest VLC 1.1.7, I now have to keep a copy of VLC 0.86i around and pray that system updates don’t render it unusable any time soon.
Then there’s GraphicConverter, an inexpensive Swiss Army-knife of a graphics program that is packed with essential functionality. With the release of version 7 a little while back, the interface was completely re-engineered. Having got far more than my money’s worth out of GraphicConverter over the years, I instantly paid the upgrade fee - and then regretted it. The new interface is gorgeous to look at, but useful functionality has disappeared. You can’t select a group of files in the browser, choose ‘New folder’, and have GraphicConverter move the files into a new folder that has been intelligently-named based on the names of the collected files (I actually requested that feature and sent in a sketch of the naming algorithm, and Thorstein Lemke, author of GraphicConverter, implemented it and released it in three days: that’s service). You can’t press a command key to copy the currently-displayed image in a slideshow to another folder. And so on. GraphicConverter is still indispensable, but perhaps a little less so than it was before.
As a developer, I understand that you can’t please all the people all the time. Sometimes you have to prioritize and give most of the people most of what they want, at the expense of a few users or a few features. Still, when the shiny new version is demonstrably less functional than its predecessors, maybe you should take time to circle back and restore some of the things that made your software great in the first place.
Daz3D have shipped version 8 of their 3D graphics software Carrara, including a 64-bit version for Mac. Having played around with it for a bit, my impression is that it was released in too much of a hurry: there are a lot of bugs, ranging from trivial interface glitches to some that will hang or crash the program. It’s also much too easy to trigger some of the bad ones.
This isn’t entirely unexpected. Initial releases of Carrara have always tended to be flaky. To their credit, Daz usually fix the problems fairly promptly. I’ve found Carrara 7.2 to be a fairly solid application (with only a handful of lingering show-stoppers) and a pleasure to work with.
This work-in-progress image was made with Carrara 8, and uses exactly none of the new features of the software. Still, it does prove that the new version is (just) stable enough to get some work done.
In other news, I’ve set up a new domain called Bytescapes to show off some of my questionable 3D imagery (let’s not call it ‘art’). Currently there is nothing there except a random slideshow of recent work, but I hope that if I scatter enough links around the web then the search engines may take an interest and it won’t suffer in obscurity like so many of my other projects.
