In particular, a plea to developers of applications that use a plug-in architecture: Please, please do some kind of lazy or deferred initialization of the plug-ins. Speaking as someone who routinely uses Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, I cannot count how much of my life I waste watching the “initializing plug-ins that you will never, ever use” messages zip by on the splash screen.
Thank you.
posted 18:16Can't you disable the ones you're sure you won't use? Drag 'em out of the ./plugins folder?
Posted by: Simon at October 14, 2004 12:34 PMSure can. But there's more to the problem than that:
1. Some of the plug-ins really can't be removed and have the application work correctly.
2. I tend to use a lot of these applications in one of two modes: either I'm doing a quick-look or fix on something, or I'm going to settle down and work for a long period. The problem is that having all of the plug-ins available is required for the long-session use, but they just slow things down in the quick-fix use.
I'm getting to be a huge fan of crash-only software. Fast startups are, I think, a competitive advantage waiting to happen.
Posted by: Christophe at October 27, 2004 07:22 AM