The browser wars is a good thing, since you have the browsers competing for the market share by offering improvements and new features. The truly winner of the browser wars is the browser user.
However, there’s another war in course, which I read about a couple weeks ago, and they named it the version race, or the version wars. It seems that providing new features and improvements on the browsers is not enough anymore: one must provide a freshness of a “new browser”, and this is being achieved by increasing the major version number each new release. As a programmer myself, I found it really annoying.
Version numbers have their significance, and it’s being lost now. Let me explain one of the most common interpretations: for example, let’s take the “1.7.4” version number. Here, the “4” is the release number, and it should be increased each time the developer publishes some correction, bug fixing or some minor feature which doesn’t break compatibility with the current version.
The “7” is the minor version number, which is increased each time you have a significant new feature, maybe with some minor compatibility break (usually corrected by the program itself), but despite the improvement, you’re still on the same major version.
And the “1” is the major version number, which is increased every time you have a big change on the program, often with a significant part of the source code being entirely rewritten. It’s almost like a new program under the same name.
I remember when Google Chrome browser was launched in 2008, and everybody was amazed with its fast evolution, with a galloping major version number increasing. Then at some point, with so many major version numbers (and minimal improvements), people simply didn’t care about it anymore. In the future, when Chrome really have something new to show… it will be just another version number, because they wasted the whole arsenal of numbers already.
The worst: Mozilla entered the version race with Firefox 5 in June of 2011, which should have been versioned just as “4.1”.
An alternative to this is join the Microsoft boat, which likes to use years as version numbers, like “Office 2010” – although internally they follow the regular version number convention. This year-versioning is good, because it gives you a clear sense of time, you quickly associate the program with “how old” it is. Maybe a month/year versioning for the browsers, since there are several versions within a year. But what about “Chrome 7”? What do you associate it to nowadays?
Version race leaves a blurry track behind the software evolution. Stop the version race.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Replay Gain
I’d say this Replay Gain thing is the coolest thing that appeared on the personal computer music listening world since the birth of Winamp in 1997.
How it works: first you use a Replay Gain scanner to add a couple new tags to each song of your music library. These new tags stamp a relative perceived loudness level corrector to each song, so that when your player plays them, it will raise or lower the volume accordingly, and all the songs will have the same volume (or almost), and you don’t need to raise/lower the volume yourself anymore. This is specially useful if you have a long playlist in shuffle mode, with songs at all sorts of different volumes.
Several music players of today implement Replay Gain, but some of them don’t perform the scan. If you want a suggestion, try foobar2000, it can do all the job.
Corollary: if you have a large and heterogeneous music library, Replay Gain will make you smile.
Now on the technical side: I found what it seems to be the C implementation of the Replay Gain scanner at the (rather old-school) project site. It really drove me curious, I guess I’ll download and try to compile it later.
How it works: first you use a Replay Gain scanner to add a couple new tags to each song of your music library. These new tags stamp a relative perceived loudness level corrector to each song, so that when your player plays them, it will raise or lower the volume accordingly, and all the songs will have the same volume (or almost), and you don’t need to raise/lower the volume yourself anymore. This is specially useful if you have a long playlist in shuffle mode, with songs at all sorts of different volumes.
Several music players of today implement Replay Gain, but some of them don’t perform the scan. If you want a suggestion, try foobar2000, it can do all the job.
Corollary: if you have a large and heterogeneous music library, Replay Gain will make you smile.
Now on the technical side: I found what it seems to be the C implementation of the Replay Gain scanner at the (rather old-school) project site. It really drove me curious, I guess I’ll download and try to compile it later.
About this blog
Hello, dear reader.
There are times when you just want to say something, or maybe share something which seemed interesting at that moment, or maybe just voice your opinion about a particular event.
Well, that’s why I’ve just created this blog. I have no idea about what I’m gonna write down here, there’s nothing specific, just writing away. And as a first post, I just wanted to register the idea of this lack of ideas, and at the same time, the high amount of them.
So be it.
There are times when you just want to say something, or maybe share something which seemed interesting at that moment, or maybe just voice your opinion about a particular event.
Well, that’s why I’ve just created this blog. I have no idea about what I’m gonna write down here, there’s nothing specific, just writing away. And as a first post, I just wanted to register the idea of this lack of ideas, and at the same time, the high amount of them.
So be it.
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