VM question

Boris Popov wrote:

Let me put it this way, people who update software on their machines are used to constantly downloading 10s of megabytes of stuff without really thinking about it, so why is it that we seem to be coming back to this issue every once in a while? I don't think I have had a single complaint from an end user about the size of the updates in my whole career. Think about the last adobe acrobat update you installed, it was probably more than 20 megs, now think of windows updates, mac os patches and such and decide if you'd rather have cincom spend their cycles on improving the product than on making it marginally smaller.

Download bandwidth is more a concern for dialup visitors downloading demos. As they still make up round about 25% on my website (according to Google Analytics),  it's a good idea to keep demo downloads < 20 MB. Logfiles show a significant number of cancelled/aborted downloads, likely because the visitor decides to no longer wait for the download and go elsewhere.

The other main concern is launch time and "snappiness", i.e. how responsive an application reacts when double-clicking on associated documents.

Getting rid of 50% and more of stuff that is never used by (sometimes not even remotely related to) the deployed application is not "making it marginally smaller". I agree with Carl that most developers - not only those with a history in static compiler languages - expect an IDE to reliably produce a final product that is compact and self-contained to a reasonable extent.

Provided the deployment tools and some aspects of OS integration are improved, VW has a great potential to be recognized by the crowd of cross-platform desktop software creators who are still struggling with C++ and the like. I think Cognitone's applications can prove this is possible.

Andre


_______________________________________________
vwnc mailing list
[hidden email]
http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/vwnc