Love and/or hate your software?

Dontcha think that "hate" is a strong word to describe an emotion about an inanimate object? Is getting emotionally attached to a piece of software, when as has already been pointed out, you can just as easily migrate to another piece of software, worth the expenditure of energy?

A lot of software is designed and functions to perform some pretty mundane stuff. It's easy to get excited about glitzy new apps that do something innovative or in a new direction. Not so easy when it comes to just "same old; same old" even if the interface had a makeover last week ;~)

Then there's that divide between professional and personal. In professional use, I know that I push software applications way outside their normal usage boundaries constantly... and get dinged for it with crashes, hang-ups, and corrupt files. That is not as frequent in personal (home; messing around) use.

On my laptop which has both professional and personal applications (not counting internet / cloud apps I use), there are 189 programs installed. I'm not entirely sure just how to approach ranking them in any meaningful way.

About half those programs are used "rarely" a dozen are used "occasionally," and the remainder used frequently. That means I'm using a lot of programs fairly often -- around a hundred. Looking at the list, it can be narrowed to something like 30 or 40 that I consider "important" in one way or another. That's still a lot.

Most often used (without cloud or online access only apps) in no particular order are Tweetdeck, various word processing, spreadsheet, and drawing apps, Quicken, Adobe (couple of products there in addition to reader), iTunes, Scanner interface, photo editing apps (a couple of those), Notepad, project management software (several of those), web cam / conferencing, Outlook, and (oddly enough) Google Earth. Outlook is in there because I do occasionally pull down email from Google or Yahoo but email is mostly on-line for me.

The apps that just do their job most often without hitches, glitches, or conundrums are Notepad, Quicken, OpenOffice, OpenProject, Firefox in the browser department, and Outlook (but I don't use it often any more).

There's nothing in the desktop software department I'm truely excited about. Maybe Inkscape and XMind but I just started using those recently.

I am excited about online Agile project tools -- there's several of those that are quite good as well as some nice online collaboration tools of various sorts.

Thinking it's time to use that "Add or Remove Programs" tool,

William W. (Woody) Williams
Project Management Consultant
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