photo by jmanners
Great-looking {screenshots | videos | demos} is a minimum when evaluating software products. When, after tests and demos and various assessments, your pen approches the sheet to finally tick the functional checkbox, remember one thing to ask to the vendor wooing you: "Your product demo looks great, but now hand me your keyboard, leave the room, and let me have an unbiased look on my own"
Because even without access to the source, a quick glance like this one can reveal a lot:
- "Ooooooooh, myriads of .vbs files doing the installation/updating. Hello, is this 2010?"
- or "Well, the user UI may be fine, but I'm not exactly fond of administrative interfaces implemented in 1995-ish gray unresizable nested multi-tabbed Java applets using Comic Sans and GIF exports of pixelated MS cliparts"
- or "Are these four different UI frameworks for the same object-listing purpose? My little finger tells me someone didn't to its integration homework when buying competitors"
- or "Wow, the lawyer responsible for your EULA would have done a great job defending this dictator on trial I just saw on TV"
Before I go on, two facts to temper my musings:
- As a hobbyist programmer, I know that complexity means hairy stuff growing here and there. If perfection exists somewhere, it is certainly not in software.
- Also, the result matters more that the means; a useless program coded in the awesomest language with top-notch libraries and using the greatest package management techniques remains useless.