Ahh the DOS days are long gone I'm afraid... A single 1024x1024 app icon on Mac OS X weighs in at 4MB once it's inflated to raw bitmap data from ICNS / PNG. Throw a couple of those onscreen at once in a list and you're looking at 30MB easy, and that's just in images!
Of course, you could leave out the images, but you could also just keep using DOS if RAM is a concern :-)
1024 x 1024 * 4 bytes per pixel = 4MB. Ok. There's no software engineering problem there, just bafflement at wanting almost as many pixels as would vertically fill a 1080p screen, for a fucking icon.
Because the vast majority of these people don't have the slightest clue as to how computers work. No troll, no bully, no malice. They don't know and they don't want to know. They deliberately wish to remain ignorant, as evidenced by the offence they take and rationalization they make whenever someone tries to explain any of the realities of modern hardware to them.
WEB SCALE!
IO BOUND!
Forget assembly, they refuse to learn even the most basic and incredibly important consequences of the memory hierarchy. It's garbage collection and best practices all the way down.
I don't want to make fun of people. In fact, I can't make fun of people because the overwhelming majority doesn't appreciate the joke.
I'm replying to two people upset about the ridiculous resource usage of simple modern programs. Bring it up-thread if you want to defend against literal waste, I'm just talking about why it happens.
Those TSRs also had little to no UI, and keep an index for fast searches. Images are probably also a part of it since seemingly no application these days can look like a native application anymore :|
It is a bug, but it also means that Launch doesn't consume negligible CPU.
2.6b2's default behavior is to index too agressively. There are fixes out there, for those (like myself) who want to build their own binaries on Windows.
Only because other people have it as well, doesn't mean it's not an abnormality. On my system Launchy pegs a single core for 4 seconds when reindexing, and the rest of the time sits literally at 0%. I can get as much as 10% of a core out of it by holding down ctrl+space, but that's it.
Shouldn't the docs mention that alt-space already does something on windows? Or is it assumed that whoever doesn't know about the default functionality won't miss it? Or maybe everyone knows?
Sometimes people just get a great idea for a cool keyboard shortcut and simply don't know that it already has a standard meaning.
This may be such a case, and Parallels is definitely one. Parallels 11 takes over the spacebar (just plain spacebar) in Windows Explorer, using it to pop up an OSX Quick Look panel like it does in Finder.
They apparently didn't think to check whether spacebar already does something in Explorer. (It does, and keyboard users like me use it all the time - it's an essential shortcut for keyboard navigation.)
And from what I've seen in forums and other interactions, they can't seem to imagine that it was a bad idea to take over this key with no option to turn off the behavior.
I should have mentioned what spacebar does in my original comment, sorry! Meant to get back to you on this, so from the "better late than never" department...
In a Windows multiple-selection listbox, such as the right pane of Explorer when it displays a list of files or directories, the keyboard focus and selection are two separate concepts.
When a listbox has the keyboard focus, either a single element is outlined with a dotted rectangle - the element with the focus - or no elements at all.
Independently of that, zero or more elements may be selected. These elements are highlighted with a fill color.
You can use the arrow keys to navigate through the list, and both the selection and keyboard focus track together. Similarly, if you start typing, the selection and keyboard focus jump to a matching name. In both these situations, there is a single item selected, the same one that has the keyboard focus.
Or you can use Ctrl+arrow to navigate, which moves only the keyboard focus without changing the selection. Then you can use the spacebar to toggle the selection on the element with the keyboard focus, either adding it to or removing it from the set of selected elements.
In Parallels, these spacebar presses also pop up the OSX Quick View panel.
In this situation you can alternatively use Ctrl+spacebar, which does the same thing but doesn't trigger the popup. In fact that's as convenient as plain spacebar, or maybe even more convenient because you can just hold down the Ctrl key the whole time and use the arrow keys and spacebar to navigate and select.
So where does it become a problem? Try this:
Use Windows+E or any other method to open an Explorer, navigate to This PC, and in the right panel double-click the C: drive or any drive.
Note that there is now no keyboard focus rectangle in the right panel. Imagine the first item listed is a directory and you want to open that directory with the keyboard.
The Enter key at this point does nothing.
You can use the down arrow, but it focuses and selects the second item in the list.
You can type the letter that the first directory name begins with, but if there are two or more directories beginning with that letter, this also selects the second one.
The easy and reliable way to select the first directory is with the spacebar. And now you can use Enter to open that directory.
For whatever reason, I seem to often be in a situation where I want to navigate into a series of nested directories where the first directory is the one I want. It's very convenient to start typing spacebar, enter, spacebar, enter, etc.
Of course Ctrl+Spacebar also works without opening the OSX popup. But it's not exactly the same as Spacebar - it toggles the selection instead of always selecting.
And we're talking about 20-30 years of muscle memory - I've been using the spacebar, enter, spacebar, enter sequence ever since the earliest days of Windows. It's always worked on physical machines, in VMware, and in Parallels... Until Parallels 11 broke it.
Of course it's perfectly understandable that you weren't aware of this spacebar behavior! Probably only a small minority of users are aware of it. For those of us who do, it's pretty annoying to see that popup every time.
Indeed, better late than never! Maybe "up arrow" instead of space would work? Way less convenient though. I wonder how you're lucky enough to always need the first dir.
They definitely should. I have a dedicated button for it, so will continue to use that, but many of my colleagues (at a S-ME IT service provider) didn't know this menu existed. Trust the Indian guy to know, though
You have a dedicated Alt+Space (System Menu) button? Never saw that before, would be curious what kind of keyboard this is. I'm always interested in different kinds of keyboards.
Or is it a menu key that opens the right-click menu (not the same as the alt+space system menu), like this one:
I'm pretty sure that the .NET runtime can compete on size with Electron. I.e. it is as big if not bigger. We just don't care about that because Microsoft includes it in the base OS.
You both assume that people only use applications installed via a "standard" installer, that sit in c:\program files (or whatever) and have proper menu entries.
I have 4 GB of random stuff under c:\apps of which some things have been copied over for nearly 10 years and countless windows installations. Also PortableApps, which don't sit in the start menu.
Don't want to be the naysayer here, but this project is yet another 'I made smth already exisiting but with node.js and the original is still largely better'.
I think there are more interesting open source projects that should hit the HN frontpage. So let's start with this one, that computes Wikipedia Pagerank on a single node in less than 30 minutes :
https://www.nayuki.io/page/computing-wikipedias-internal-pag...
Yeah, (born and raised in Ireland, complete with the mandatory Irish Language lessons), I'm just wondering where the poster above got the supposed "h" sound from.
I'm pretty sure it's pronounced with that 'h' sound in Ulster but most schools in Ireland are taught "Gaeilge na Mumhan" so we grew up it being an 'f' sound
Don't know what this guy used exactly, but GifCam is really good - http://blog.bahraniapps.com/gifcam/ - it's not fancy, but it's well done on the engineering side, maintains good FPS when capturing and compresses really well.
Uh, where did you get the VB for terrible performance and CPU usage? There's nothing inherent to the language that makes it less efficient than C# or anything else running on the CLR.
Launchy sits there with 30mb ram used and no cpu used when not in use.
This launcher sits there with 170mb ram used, and 1% of a core in constant use.