I have used all kinds of software, but lately I have been looking at the software I use and I made an interesting discovery. Most of the software I use every day cost me less than a $100. I have also noticed that I don’t use monolithic software very much any more, and that is interesting.
I define monolithic software as the swiss army knife of their class. These are photoshop, word, excel, et al. I don’t use these software anymore. For photo editing I use Acorn. For personal databasing I use Bento. For audio recording I use GarageBand. For word processing/page layout I use Pages. For spreadsheets I use numbers. The defining thing about most of these programs are that they are tightly focused, and less than a hundred dollars.
I’ve come to the conclusion that large monolithic programs that attempt to do it all are the wrong way to do software. Large programs are harder to maintain which costs the software development house which they rightly look to their user base to fund. Large programs also make the common user pay for things that they will never use. How many times have you used the posterize filter in Photoshop?
What I envision is a set of programs that work together as a set of tools. Buy what you need; ignore the rest. Use the scripting capabilities of your environment to set up workflows between these programs.
This idea has to start somewhere and I propose that there should be some kind of file format organization. The Software development firms may uses these file formats without cost. They may not extend the formats. If they wanted a certain extension they need to define it and propose it to the standard file organization. This ensures that tools set up to handle a particular file can open the file regardless of whoever fiddled with it. I know about Open Document, but what about databases, photo manipulation, etc?
Let’s have a little thought experiment. I am a professional photographer, and I have a selection of tools to work with my images. The first tool that I might have would be some kind of library that removes my photos from my camera. Maybe the tool could do simple conversions of photos from camera raw to jpeg, or png. When I wished to work deeply with my photos, I might use a Program called Darkroom. This program’s focus is on darkroom style effects. I would save my altered photo as the new standard photo file, like a .psd, or .xcf. For some of my assignments I may have to cobble together images, so I open them in a Compositor program. Once I am finished with them I save them in the standard photo file format. When I am ready to submit my photos I open the photo publisher which will output the files into the variety of file formats for publication.
The whole idea behind this is that I should be able to move my files around the various tools that work with these files. These tools can be razor sharp on a few things. I buy the tools that I need which should be cheaper if I don’t need all of the pro tools. By going back to tightly focused and smaller programs it should make maintenance easier. The programs don’t need a lot of programmers. With Cheaper programs then the economic incentive to pirate software would go away. Why buy pirated software when for $50 you can be legitimate?
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