Quote of Cornelius:
If you had half a brain & decent search-engine skills, you'd know the MS Download Manager has been around since 2005 for MSDN subscribers.
I wouldn't need half a brain, but I'd need to be a developer for MS architecture, which I'm not. Don't go out insulting people for not knowing what you do.
Ibrahim:
DownThemAll has started based on the Mozilla Suite download manager, i.e. the old SeaMonkey one. Not sure if Opera did the same. The Mozilla Suite one might have been based on what Netscape 4 had, but I can't remember the design so far back.
fred:
Well, I re-implemented the one we have in SeaMonkey 2, and which is pictured there, so I needed to stare a lot on it for a reason. The older one from SeaMonkey 1.x and Mozilla Suite with the confusing toolbar that acts on the selection instead of the mini-buttons in the tree and without a Search filter looked even more like the MS one. If you say they don't look alike, you're confusing theme with structure. Switch the MS one to WinClassic theme, or ours to Aero/Glass/whatever it's called now, and the design would match more. The structure is basically the same.
Pete:
The Firefox Download Manager looks completely different, for example, and so others do as well. Those that look similar might just all have been inspired by Netscape 4 (and earlier?), I have a hunch that it already had that design, and given it had a majority market share back then, it's reasonable that it would be the source of such inspiration.
I didn't want to say that SeaMonkey is doing the innovation for Microsoft (though I'd like that theme), I just found the similarity impressing, given that I'm told that SeaMonkey is conservative, backwards, old school, and probably irrelevant in the modern world and Internet.
Also, copying is nothing bad in software design, re-using successful and good ideas is a good base for creating good software (of course you need to put your own innovation on top of that). A bad idea in software design is to avoid copying others by re-inventing successful things from the ground without any good reason other than the successful one not being your idea (if you have good reasons to make it much better while rebuilding it differently, that's something else, of course). Consistency even between different pieces of software is usually good for the learning processes of users, needless differences are harming it a lot.
Zuletzt bearbeitet von KaiRo am 23.05.2010 13:13
23.05.2010 13:07