Geoff Chappell - Software Analyst
Research and writing for this website has stopped while I take stock of what it’s good for, how it can be continued and whether I should want to continue it. Whatever was here at this website on 1st November 2010 is pretty much all there ever will be. There may be corrections, because I am of course responsible for what I have written. There may from time to time be some maintenance and tidying up, but I do not plan to do any significant updating, let alone to write anything truly new.
I have called time on this before, in September 2009, yet somehow kept the work sputtering along. The experience of trying to do that was deeply unsatisfying. This last year’s work is of a greatly diminished ambition. It’s work I’d have been pleased enough with five or more years ago, but it’s a shadow of what I have since seen can be achieved if freed from the ever-present need to make this sort of work pay its own way.
The links below provide access to the 329 pages that were added or substantially revised in the not-quite-a-year before suspension in September 2009, as I rushed to have something to show for the years I had committed to this documentation project. If those pages do not themselves demonstrate the worth of my project as a public good, then neither will any amount of additional writing, and the experiment is better judged a failure. That’s a shame. There is so much more to find out and write up, so few who try, and hardly anyone who does it well enough that it might be sensible to imagine relying on it. How much innovation in interacting with Windows has been missed because nobody knew quite enough about Windows even to see the possibility? For all that’s written about crowds pooling their wisdom to produce commercial-quality work for the public benefit, you might think they’d have done better at the question of what’s in the world’s most-used software.
There are older pages, of course, but I did not start listing them by date until late 2008. Until someone asked, it just never occurred to me that anyone would want them listed by date.