We need standard user interfaces and more cooperation between applications.
With the current state of affairs, I need to purchase, learn, use several applications, just because no one application has the features that I want. I will use Graphics programs as an example, since that is one application area that I have been banging my head on for years.
What we need is one user interface in which all graphics related software gets installed. This way I could fire up one application, and always look the same place in the menus for image processing, drawing tools, or whatever. An Eclipse for graphics programs is what is needed. Maybe just build all graphics programs into Eclipse.
Lately I have been trying to organize photographs, process some of them and create photo album web pages. For years I used IrfanView for looking at graphic files, which worked very well when that is all I wanted to do. Now that I have a digital camera I have thousands of images to play with. After trying several other programs I discovered that IrfanView also works well for generating photo album web pages. To make a long story shorter, I have not found any one program that works well for working with photos, and sometimes drawing on them. I find myself using IrfanView, Picasa, ZoomBrowser EX, GIMP, PhotoShop and Flickr all in one photo organization, editing, posting session. Maybe I can weed out PhotoShop and one or two of the other programs as I become more familiar with the capability of each.
Years ago I used a program called MacDraft, which was very easy to use and did nice line drawings. This program is lost in the dust bin of history, maybe just because I haven't used Macs in the last 15 years.
At one time I used Microsoft Image Composer for all my simple art work and web graphics. This one is also lost in the dust bin of history, since I don't bother digging out my FrontPage 98 CD to install this program when setting up new systems.
For circuit board designs I use Mentor Graphics, just because that is what someone at work chose to use years ago. Its a real monster of a program, dos things in weird ways, and has many inconsistencies between programs. It dos not share data well with non Mentor graphics software. The recent version on Windows didn't help much because it is just the old software running on a Unix emulator.
For FPGA designs I use Xilinx ISE, which is yet another graphics editor to learn. Its not too bad once you learn it, but doesn't work like other graphics editing programs. Also a few bugs in the schematic editor make it frustrating to use.
And the story is similar for software development. I use Visual Studio for C# and C++, but need to use something else if I work on Linux. Embedded C takes yet another IDE. VHDL , Verilog, or SystemC take yet other IDEs. At least the software development zoo is starting to be tamed by Eclipse.
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