[Mod note: post subject changed to better reflect main topic status for program. Original subject was "Phototheca devs: USB sticks too slow [now payware]"]
Got an interesting response when I contacted the developers of a free photo management tool, Phototheca:
> I'm one of these thumb drive / portable software folks. Any chance your program could run off a USB drive (no installation, saves settings locally?)
There is no chance that Phototheca could run as portable software, there is the quite strong reason for this: Phototheca gives nice user experience with zero delay when open Events and Albums because we store thumbnails of your photos on hard drive for the fastest access inside special database. If to put this database on a USB stick - the reading of thumbnails will be very slow, since USB drives much more slower then hard drives, what gives bad experience of using Phototheca and doesn't look reasonable. Basing on this we do not plan to offer the portable version.
If you have any other questions about Phototheca software, please contact me on anv atsymbolthingy lunarship.com and I’ll help you out.
I wanted to reply that there are plenty of thumb drives out that some people store their whole lives on a thumb drive and some of the discs under that media are are as fast or faster than local disks but I thought I'd poll the community on this one. How should I reply?
The advantages of a portable version far outweigh the disadvantages.
They should release a portable version.
They should present the "issues" to the user and the user should be the one to decide.
That's if they can spare the resources...
Almost forgot about one huge advantage for any user: saving the settings in its own folder makes the application ready immediately after an OS reinstall for example.
Last edited by joby_toss on Sat Mar 09, 2013 2:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You should show them some usb 3.0 flash drive benchmarks. Stuff like the SanDisk Extreme have over 200 MB/s read/write speeds which is way faster than most mechanical hard drives. It should nullify their argument unless their talking about the majority of people who have cheap usb sticks.
Maybe you could rephrase your request. Don't even mention usb flash drives. Just ask them to give an option to read/save settings inside program folder. Also maybe ask them to change the default install location to Program Files like the rest of the world does. It's weird that it installs to "%UserProfile%\AppData\Local\Phototheca" by default.
tproli wrote:I'm using portable applications on my FIXED hard drive 99.9% of the time so the logic behind "USB sticks too slow" should not be an excuse.
tproli wrote:I'm using portable applications on my FIXED hard drive 99.9% of the time so the logic behind "USB sticks too slow" should not be an excuse.
Ditto
I used to do the same when I've been a Windows user.
And, really, modern USB drives can be much faster than spinning rust. The developer doesn't know what they are doing or slowness was just an excuse. Well, nobody knows everything, if the dev is simply wrong, it may be possible to convince them to change the course. Either way, talking with them is the best way forward.
Phototheca is no longer free- http://lunarship.com/shop.html. It seems that for many developers portability is taboo. Also there is no logic to think that a portable version will be used exclusively from a thumb drive. Other developers choose to sell the portable versions of their programs as separate products at higher prices which for me is unacceptable.