Pratchettes - 2.0

Gary and the rest at Unseen Software have brought us a truly outstanding application here. In fact, my roommate has admonished me for months about my constant "Terry Pratchett quote of the day." As a non-Pratchett reader, he hasn't really understood the depth and scope of Pratchett's social satire. Now when I'm trying to quote the specific Pratchett comment, I can look it up first and get the wording right in Mr. Pratchett's amazing turn of phrase. (Those with the application, look up "Gilt."

This software is exhaustively put together, very stable, and extremely well designed. In addition to a staggering number of quotes from an author with highly prolific turnout, the program features a beautiful map of the Discworld, a descriptive discussion of this amazing creatively produced world, and a biography of Mr. Pratchett that is more detailed even than ones I've found online.

I am quite impressed with the developers' attention to detail. Another reviewer pointed out some spelling mistakes, however the author was kind enough to provide us an EDITOR for the database, possibly foreseeing the need to fix the occasional OCR scanning mistake or typo. The result is that in a few keystrokes one can fix the quote that pops up with a typo.

I have only three requests for future versions:

1) Add Sam Vimes in the portraits along the top of the window. Vimes is perhaps the most influential and effective character in Pratchett's worlds. The cop who knows that the only thing keeping him on the right side of the law is his badge and iron discipline, Sam Vimes is my personal hero. (In addition to Sam Vimes I might recommend adding Rincewind, one of Pratchett's more beloved characters.)

2) This is actually more important: I would like the ability to kill the application window without shutting it down. As an author (non-fiction) I have a number of applications active at any one time on my desktop, from my word processor to my web browser to my notes/organizational software. Although expose' is a great tool and helps keep things relatively organized, anything that can be done to reduce clutter and lower the open window count is a good thing, in my book. Reducing the application to the dock is partially effective, but still provides unnecessary clutter.

3) I would absolutely love a minimized, background version that would pop up the Terry Pratchett Quote of the Day at a prescheduled time. This could be set to pop up on the first log in from screensaver after the user runs the program. I don't know how difficult this would be to implement, but it would be cool as all heck.

Gary, if/when you read this, you've done a fantastic job, and I'm highly impressed with the work you do. Please keep it up! (And in response to your comment to the reviewer about the spelling mistakes, I'm willing to periodically send you my updated database with corrections if you're willing to add them to the program. I'll contact you soon.)

Pratchett fans, you'll love this program.

Today's quote: "...many people in the universe have also had the misplaced belief that they can safely ignore gravity, mostly after taking some local equivalent of dried frog pills, and this has led to much extra work for elementary physics and caused brief traffic jams in the streets below."

~D.

Brilliant idea, but does it need an installer?

I always feel a bit wary running installer packages, call me weird, I'm just more comfortable with drag installs.