"I'll buy it if I want it and can't write it". Or, to put it another way, if I think I could cook up the app myself in a Saturday's worth of hacking and drinking, then I expect to get it free. That might not be entirely reasonable... but it's how i think. The result of this is that for smaller programs, I tend to open my wallet for the ones that really go above and beyond the norm.
Notable "utility" apps I've laid out money for in the past few years:
- Trillian
- TV Tool (a nice little utility for bypassing the onerous DRM restrictions and sad TV support implemented by NVidia drivers).
- Nero
- Firebug (ok, this was a donation… but I’d have paid it if I’d needed to)
They all do things I needed, couldn't get free, and would have spent months working out on my own. And with the exception of Firebug, they all have terrible user interfaces. Heck, just about every single app I use has a rotten UI. VS2005 is probably one of the better apps, but it can hardly be classified as "utility" - it's huge, written by hundreds of developers, and… still has a lot of problems. I certainly would never use words like "beautifully" (or even "seamlessly") to describe how they integrate with the core system. Indeed, if there's one thing common to most of the apps I use, it’s how eager they are to make you aware that you’re using them. Splash screens, heavy UIs, custom dialogs for things that the system does better, modal dialogs for things that should be non-modal…
…but such ranting gets old, eventually. Instead, I'll just give an example: source control.
At this moment, I have four source control clients
installed on this machine. Three of them offer "integration" by way of
a Visual Studio plug-in. But only the fourth actually integrates at all
well into my workflow: the TortoiseSVN client makes source control almost
seamlessly available from any OS-provided file system view, including
the standard Open and Save dialogs. The rest all provide pale
imitations of the old two-pane Fileman/Explorer interface, usually with
a few more panes tacked on for for status or other information. All
three, without fail, require me to have either a command
prompt or an Explorer window open on the "working directory" for
whatever project I’m viewing, because they don’t provide a UI for
common file management tasks. And that token nod at “integration”? VS
becomes slower with it turned on, and continually locks files I don’t
want locked. In short, they provide the worst of both worlds: UIs I
could have written on a drunken Saturday, but would never have wanted to.
Tortoise, for all its problems, provides something I’d willingly pay
for out of pocket: I’m actually more productive with it than without
it. None of the rest, paid commercial products though they are, comes
close to this.
So, Paul - I'm glad you're happy with Mac software. I don't know that I really believe it's as good as what you make it out to be, but I'll believe it is that good for you. Because, somewhere, someone must be writing usable software. I want to believe it...
