Concerns about feature bloat

Let us know what you would like to see in the next version of this software

Moderator: kfury77

Forum rules
Please follow these guidelines when posting feature requests. This will help to increase the value of your contribution.
  • Do not create new topics for already requested features. Add your comments to the existing feature request topics instead;
  • Create separate topic for each feature suggestion. Do NOT post a number of non-related feature suggestions in a single topic;
  • Give your topic a meaningful title. Do NOT create topics with meaningless titles, such as "My Suggestion" or "My Problem".
Please note that we DO READ all suggestions, even if a reply is not posted. Thanks!
Post Reply
bistromathics
Posts: 15
Joined: Mon Jul 12, 2010 9:28 pm

Concerns about feature bloat

Post by bistromathics »

I wanted to start a thread for anti-feature-bloat people to voice their concerns. I am worried that Blumentals Software is going down the track of extreme feature bloat and continuous worsening of the usability of their software. I think that a very serious cost-benefit analysis should be made for new features as well as several features already put in use. For example, I will never use "Projects" though I do not know how popular this feature is among the other users. Extra features may please a minority of users who supported its addition, but are to the detriment of the majority because things get harder and harder to find, and memory usage balloons.

You can please most people most of the time, but you can't please everybody all the time. An equilibrium must be met between features and usability and I believe your software has passed that point. Please consider this point as I believe slow performance and difficulty of use will eventually lead to loss of customers.
User avatar
Karlis
Site Admin
Posts: 3605
Joined: Mon Jul 15, 2002 5:24 pm
Location: Riga, Latvia, Europe
Contact:

Re: Concerns about feature bloat

Post by Karlis »

Rest assured, we are not going that way. Yes, it is really difficult, because we get a lot of feature requests and tons of complaints about not implementing various features. Our main goals are speed and usability.

We will add new feature if:
1) It does good for significant amount of users without significant negative effect on mos other users.
2) It does good only for few users but has no negative effect at all for almost all other users.

As for the "Projects", significant amount of users use that feature, it has almost no impact on load time and no damage to usability.

Yes, we have suffered some slowdowns at some points when implementing new code editing features and there is a lot to be done, but as you might have noted, the last major release focused mostly on things that you do not see - standards compliance, code complete, stability and compatibility.
Karlis Blumentals
Blumentals Software
www.blumentals.net
Post Reply