Have you come across the latest software product known as "Girlfriend"?

Girlfriend is a piece of software that was designed to meet requirements of both the leisure and utility market, providing mobile facilities, facilities for home entertainment, and also undertaking a management role under which it takes care of repetitive and monotonous tasks that you want to avoid doing yourself.

A sneak preview of Girlfriend showed off the mobile facilities well. A lovely looking piece of software, well dressed for presentation, with some exciting hints of what might be found inside the package later. Attempts at this early stage to access the home entertainment parts were met with "permission denied" messages.

The test release of Girlfriend performed well in terms of mobile facilities, and the home entertainments module was now operational too. Users found that the basic facilities were quick and easy to use, but that the more unusual and advanced facilities needed some prior research and were sometimes quick tricky to get working. Resource sharing facilities especially tended to be awkward, with some versions of Girlfriend shutting down completely from time to time with no apparent reason. The test release also supported a few of the repetitive tasks, which were done efficiently and well.

Girlfriend 1.0 was the first version which you had to install on your own system and pay a fee for rather than running from a CD / binary download for free. Although extra repetitive management and repetitive tasks were supported, they tended to be less cleanly performed than the few that you saw in the test release. It was also noted that Girlfriend 1.0 installed a whole lot of other pieces of software that were needed to help it run, such as Toothbrush and SinkTidy.

In a piece of software that you'll be using long term, such as Girlfriend 1.0, there are other things that needed to change too. Some of the quick and easy home use facilities became unusable at time when there was a heavy loading on the utility tasks, and some of the mobile facilities starting looking very much less pretty. Some of the advanced features settle down well, but other which had worked before ceased to be usable. And the cost of ownership rose - the space taken grew, as did the resources needed to host the software, and unexpected additional items had to be purchased from time to time. But, overall, Girlfriend 1.0 was an excellent piece of software - far more going "for" it than "against".

For release 2.0, an upgrade was required to provide extra storage facilities for the Daughter package that now came with Girlfriend. Many of the resources of Girlfriend were taken up with servicing the Daughter package, with the mobile and home entertainment modules being severly limited in their capacity. However, the daughter package was a delight even though it was very different indeed to the inital preview that had been seen just a couple of years previously.

A new version of the software is, I understand, to be released in the near future. It will require a full, non-transferable license to run it, it will be limited to a single processor. The marketing folks have decided to rename it "Wife".

The above article is base on an idea from last week's delegates ...
(written 2007-10-10 12:33:02)

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