QuikLink

QuikLink Interactive, Inc.
(QuikLink Software)
3350 Hogan Drive
Kennesaw, GA 30152-2504
+1 770 975 1053
hunter@QUIKLINKS.COM
http://www.quiklinks.com

It's 6,747,175 bytes 'out of the box' - 6.43MB. This is a ZIP file which expands to a WISE install executable of 6,762,822 bytes - 6.45MB (the savings by zipping the executable is in other words marginal). With a WISE install executable there is no way of knowing what will happen when you install, of seeing what's inside the install package, of knowing in advance what horrors will beset one's Registry, so let's pause for a second and see what we have.

A bookmark organizer. That's it. There's a lot of functionality here - all the major net reviewers have been all over this one. The interface is intuitive - and for a trivial 621KB more you can get 18 'skins' for it so you can look like anything from a Mac to a USDOD top secret terminal. All the gadgets are in place. You can drag-drop, you can right click everywhere, you basically import bookmarks from almost every known browser out there, you assemble them and organize them, then you can export them again if you wish. This is neat and it's great functionality. Further, you can flag any particular bookmark for opening with a specified browser. There are so many sites on the net today claiming 'this works best with...' It's not good policy, it shows the site author is a real nuthead, but the fact remains that there are still countless sites such as this standing, and if you want to access them you might need to switch browsers, might need to use a particular one.

All this is great. Great, provided of course that there is a need for it. Assessing this need is difficult. Some people might want to live their lives surfing the net and doing so with only a pre-assigned set of URLs which they have organized into a tool such as QuikLink. All of this is hard to say. A great many people, for better or for worse, take their surfing casually and incidentally, they get where they want to go by struggling along with whatever browser they happen to have, etc. And don't give the matter much thought. If anything, then bookmark organizer add-ons such as QuikLink are not essential, and might not even provide a basis for daily net work, but if they work and you like them then they can be good.

Right now the scream is QuickBrowse of course, and the news industry in particular is going for it big, and these are real customers. QuickBrowse got 30,000 registrations by word of mouth alone. That's really something. It's difficult to imagine that any bookmark organizer would ever be able to compete with that. But that is hardly the point here anyway - here the concern is just 'software', and beyond how useful it can be, how well written it is.

This is a VB app - and 'VB app' in most professional circles is regarded as an oxymoron. For those of you who are unacquainted with VB mentality, VB programming is basically the assembling of 'OPC' ('Other People's Code') into a hopefully cohesive whole on the VB desktop and then making it all work together. We saw that incredible example, FuelCDP, where the author bloated on yet another OCX simply because he needed to center text vertically. Incredible, and mind-boggling, but this is the way VB people work. They speak of 'code-only replacements' and the like - writing one's own code is a dim alternative, not often used, a topic of which they know very little.

VB is at the same time, ironically enough, the confirmation of what Bjarne Stroustrup has been going on about all along. It is not a good example of what he wanted, perhaps, but it is the greatest living testimony to his ideals. Object re-use. NeXTSTEP does do it much much better, NeXTSTEP does do it right, you can't compare the environments at all, but the idea with VB is basically the only living proof in the PC world that there is any content to Bjarne's contention that object re-use works.

But does it? Oh yes, it does - as long as the sight of a 6MB download module for only a bookmark organizer does not shock or frighten you. For there is where we have the cruncher. How big should a bookmark organizer be? How big should any program be? Let's compare with what we've already got on disk to get an idea. In other words, let's start slowly.

QuikLink organizes bookmarks for browsers - in other words, it's an add-on utility for a browser. It should therefore stand to reason that QuikLink does not contain the amount of code a browser has, it only deals with a subset of the total browser functionality. A browser add-on should therefore be minimal in comparison.

But the humungoid Netscape executable today weighs in at about 5MB, the total minimal install at about 15-20MB. With Internet Explorer it's harder to determine, because Microsoft, as we all know by now, has been determined to integrate browsing into the desktop, and the controls used by IE are all over the place, its own executable remarkably small (the list of 'dependencies' however more than a mile longer than for any other app in the system).

So in all fairness, and without even having tested this application yet, it can be said that yes, 6MB is a bit big.

Now let's get real. 6MB is atrocious. Any application on the net today at 6MB is one of the biggest anywhere in an already ridiculously bloated market. The kind of apps we have - the kind you used to see everywhere - can still be found - the ones without an install program ('because you don't need an install program' the notes will say). These still do exist. Contrary to Microsoft opinion, not every application has or needs CLSID's. Not every application needs to be a container and a potentially embedded object for other applications. Contrary to Microsoft opinion, people can still write the applications they want to write any way they please. And this is good - this is our only hope.

QuikLink represents the future - the future as Microsoft would have it. QuikLink is the perfect lackey: playing right into the hands of Microsoft developers and Microsoft butt-licking software critics everywhere. Microsoft's is a very lucrative bandwagon. Microsoft represents the nadir of IQ and quality in the software industry, true; but their machine for marketing and financial success is unparalleled - it makes good sense to sit in their lap and spout their praise.

The world of the VB programmer is so different from the world of the real programmer. Real programmers don't know anything about skins, and probably haven't even heard of them. Real programmers rarely use PCs at all, and when they do are probably running 16-bit Windows 3.1 and using text mode file managers and Internet browsers and email clients. Real programmers don't necessarily use a mouse so often. The phrase we've seen so often, 'This program cannot be run in DOS mode', was a real mystery to Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike at Bell Labs when they were porting their programs to Windows NT, and Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike are the epitome of real programmers. And between them and the likes of Hunter Gordon are veritable light years of misunderstandings and difference.

If BWK were here himself and if he were asked to comment on QuikLink he'd probably try to get out from under it. He'd probably want to avoid the issue - not out of cowardice but because he thought the issue moot. That there is no point to it. BWK lives a glorified life, a life that most would kill to have, and yet what BWK experiences is not necessarily what we experience. We have unfortunately been stuck, day in and day out, with PC pains, something that BWK wouldn't have to worry about, running UNIX and Plan 9 and Inferno and generally feeling rather good about life. We can't feel that way. We're in the gutter. We go to McDonald's for Sunday meals. BWK goes to a Japanese steak house. But just because we're at Mac for food doesn't mean we can't level criticism, can't be particular about what we do. And most of us do have preferences, and most of us would rather decide ourselves how our work and play environments function. Add one single ingredient after that, the awareness that comes from knowledge, and you have something that is very destructive for QuikLink.

Not only QuikLink - but any application - weighing in at 6MB for add-on functionality is a blight on the software industry. Furthering this trend only makes people less sensitive to reality. When BWK once argued that the 20% write-off when migrating code from assembly to C was forgivable for various specified reasons, he was making a qualitative judgement that most accepted as more than satisfactory. But this was a mere 20%. Today in the world of the wonderful PC such marginal write-offs are unheard of. There are plenty of applications out there which copy the functionality (and often poorly) of Radsoft apps and end up weighing in at 20 or 30 times the size. There is no excuse. If you cannot fault the craftsman for the tools then you must fault the tools. Any technology built on such shoddy tools as VB is unforgivable. Totally unforgivable.

Migrating - not the actual code migration but the 'way of thinking' - from VB to C is not that difficult. If a VB programmer can understand enough to put together VB code, then that programmer can potentially learn to program in C too, and that programmer, with a lot more effort it is true, but still the same, can eventually learn to write a 'bare metal' Windows application or two as well. It's just a question of effort.

Sly Stallone makes a lot of money. His movies sell a lot of tickets. And yet there are those - himself included now, it would seem - who see between the lines and say, 'do we need all these exploding bloody heads, all this violence?' Someone wakes up.

It's time someone more woke up in Software too. Proliferating monster applications like QuikLink, whether the blame be for the craftsman or the tool, cannot go on.