#oneaday Day 410: #StopKillingSoftware

There's been a lot of attention on the #StopKillingGames movement of late, and with good reason: they have a good point, and they've also had said point misrepresented quite severely on a number of occasions, but I think most people are starting to get it.

That's all very well and good for games, but what about software?

For various reasons, I decided to reinstall Windows today. I haven't lost anything important — the computer just needed a "refresh", plus it seemed like a good opportunity to finally take the plunge to update to Windows 11 (and then promptly "debloat" it).

Any reinstall is typically followed by trying to remember which applications you had on the computer that you actually need, and then going about reinstalling them one by one. This is one scenario in which I am grateful for the digital age, rather than requiring that I hunt down a million and one CD-ROMs, though it is still quite tedious having to download everything again — and, in some cases, find license information buried deep in your email archive.

One snag I ran into today is one that I thought I might come across at one point or another: the fact that the video editing software I use, Hitfilm Express, no longer exists. Moreover, it appears that the company which made Hitfilm decided to… stop doing Hitfilm in January of this year. In fact, I get the impression they stopped doing anything.

I had been using an old version of Hitfilm for some time, because upgrading to a newer version would mean abandoning the "pay what you want" copy I had, which was perfectly fine for my needs, and instead moving to the company's new subscription-based Software as a Service model. I was disappointed to see Hitfilm move to this model, but with the amount of other software packages out there doing the same — and the original developer of Hitfilm getting acquired by a larger company — I wasn't altogether surprised. But the old version still, at least, worked.

When I went to reinstall said old version today — which I used to be able to do from my account page on the company's website — that was no longer possible. All I could do was download the subscription-based version… or so it said. The downloads page had buttons to download it, but they weren't actually linked to anything. So the software was just… gone, basically.

If I had been paying a subscription, I would have been a bit annoyed, but recognised that this is always a risk when using Software as a Service. But I paid for a perpetual license to that software — granted, I didn't pay much for it, but I still paid for it, and expected it to remain available.

But no. Hitfilm Express has ceased to be. It is an ex-parrot. My only option was to either download the subscription-based one and then do some faffing around in the hope that a subscription would actually somehow "convert" to a perpetual license for that version, or to… well, to pirate it, frankly.

I know how to use Hitfilm. I like Hitfilm — at least I did before it went all Software as a Service. I don't really want to change to using something other than Hitfilm. I know DaVinci Resolve is well-regarded, but it's also several orders of magnitude more complicated than Hitfilm Express, and I'm not sure I want or need that.

So, well… I'll leave you to imagine which of the above options I went for.

Stop Killing Games has an excellent point. It also applies to software. If one buys a piece of software for a particular purpose, one should reasonably expect that software to be left in working order even after official support ends. That doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, and that's certainly how it used to work. Hell, I can still plug in an AtariWriter cartridge to my Atari 8-bit and use that, or load up Cubase on the Atari ST. If I still had a Mac, I bet I could still get my copies of Final Cut Pro and Logic Studio working, too.

So Stop Killing Software as well as Stop Killing Games, please. And if you could just generally Stop Making Everything Worse while you're on, that'd be great also.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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2221: Seeing the Final Product Forming

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I spent a chunk of time today porting the work I've already done on a story from Google Docs online to Scrivener on my Mac. Scrivener is a piece of software I picked up quite a while back and have used sporadically whenever I feel creative; it's a lovely piece of software to keep written projects of any size manageable and organised.

For the unfamiliar, Scrivener allows you to organise your whole project into a single file, including the chapters and sections/scenes of your book, research material, front matter and general notes. Within the file, you have a tree structure of folders and items, with numerous templates available for various types of project. When you're all done, you "compile" the project like a computer program, and Scrivener spits the finished product out in the format of your choice, be it double-spaced manuscript for sending to a publisher, attractively laid out pages ready for self-publishing, or various popular eBook formats. You can even export it to a word processor if you so desire, allowing you to format it further using tools beyond that which Scrivener offers.

I was surprised what a feeling of motivation I felt from porting the existing content over to Scrivener, and I attribute this primarily to the fact that what you bung into Scrivener looks remarkably like what the finished product will end up being. In fact, if you compile a project in progress to a PDF just to have a look at how things appear, it's even more motivating, because you can imagine holding the finished book in your hands. That's quite exciting.

Just the fact that Scrivener uses some very attractive, convincingly "book-like" default fonts helps with this feeling of seeing the final product coming together, though. Couple that with the fact that Scrivener's interface is designed to be as clean and distraction-free as possible, and all in all you have a piece of software that is eminently suitable for creative types to realise their written ambitions — even if you barely use a fraction of the functionality the software has to offer, which I suspect is a category I will probably fall into unless I want to get really anal about page headers or something.

Anyway. This is a long-winded way of saying that I have been successfully motivating myself to continue with my creative writing project while I still don't have any full time work. I'm under no illusions that I'll be able to make money from this — at least initially — but the story I'm working on at present is a passion project that it will simply be satisfying to see completed at last, and released into the wild. If anyone ends up actually buying it, so much the better, of course, but if nothing else completing a project of this sort will 1) show me that I can do it, and hopefully inspire me to do more that take less than 15 years to complete and 2) stop my mother telling me every so often that I should "write that book". (She hasn't done that for a while, to be fair, which probably means it's due a mention sometime soon… I know you're reading, Mum, so take this as assurance that I'm doing it.)

So that's that. Writer? Windows or OSX-equipped? Give Scrivener a go, and you might just be surprised how much you can get done.

#oneaday Day 546: Spot the Music

Hi, Americans. I hope you're enjoying Spotify. As you may be aware, we lucky Brits have had it for some time and have been enjoying its considerable charms. It's great to see you lot get the chance now, too.

Of course, you've had plenty of services like that already available, such as Grooveshark and RDIO. You also get to play with Turntable.fm while we don't, which is a bit of a shame. As such, though, this means that Spotify is having to work a bit harder to impress you — it's working in some cases, others not.

I have a Spotify Premium account — £10 a month for ad-free unlimited playback plus the ability to use the mobile app to stream over 3G (risky given the patchy coverage in most of the UK) and/or download playlists directly to the app for offline listening (much better). Since signing up for it, I don't think I've bought a single thing from iTunes. I haven't needed to. Most of the stuff I'd want to listen to — and plenty I don't — is freely available for me to grab, stick in playlists and listen to at my leisure. There's plenty of music to keep a continuous soundtrack spinning while I do my day's work, and more than enough to set up some decent driving playlists for long journeys.

The service and its software isn't without one or two flaws, of course — you can't search playlists on the mobile apps and the interface is inexplicably the opposite way around to the native iPod app on iOS, meaning you'll find yourself bringing up track information a lot when you actually mean to just close the player screen and get back to the menus. The desktop client's habit of just disappearing and updating itself without telling you it's updating is a little unnerving, too, but at least it keeps itself up to date. (I say that — it's currently attempting to download the latest updater manually and claims that a 5MB file is going to take 16 hours to download.)

But all that aside, what Spotify provides for me has many benefits. Firstly, it's a means of listening to music that I know and love without having to root through iTunes libraries or — in many cases — stacks of CDs that are buried in a cardboard box somewhere. Secondly, it's a means of discovering new music — having listened to an album I like, taking a journey through the "Similar Artists" links is often quite eye-opening. Thirdly, and I can't emphasise how nice this is, it makes having to manually sync an iOS device almost unnecessary, software updates notwithstanding. iOS syncs have a habit of taking at least three times as long as you think they will, particularly if you really need to be somewhere and you suddenly realise you don't have any music on your iPod/have the "wrong" music on your iPod. Spotify's offline sync system isn't the quickest in the world, admittedly, but at least you can do it wirelessly without having to faff around with cables and USB ports and computers. Which is nice.

Spotify, then, is very much a Good Thing. And I'm delighted that I can now share links to tracks and albums with my friends in the US, as well as allow people to subscribe to my playlists. I already noticed that my "dungeon crawling" playlist where I just dumped a whole bunch of metal without really paying much attention to what it is has picked up a subscriber in the form of the fine Chris Whittington — guess I better be careful about what I publish from now on if people are watching! (Damn, no more Lazy Town?)