A colleague sent me an attachment today, a MindManager map file. MindManager is a tool that has become popular recently; it’s a program that allows you to build mindmaps. A lot of people here like it. I’m not intending to plug the program here, I use Notepad to make my mindmaps and it works well for me.

Of course, to view the actual MindManager map files, you need a viewer. So I went to their site and downloaded the free viewer, which turned out to be a whopping 76 megabytes of download. It included a full professional installation, that reverted back to a free viewer when the trial period expired. Good marketing, supposedly, but that was not what I was looking for.

And it integrates with the entire Office suite, install dictionaries and so on; unless you manually deactivate all those features – although I was unable to deactivate the installation of the German spell check library for some reason.

This is, I’m noticing, a trend.

• The latest Office suite, 2007, is beautiful, but appallingly heavy. Outlook is a nightmare in the load that it puts on the computer.
• Adobe Acrobat, Windows Media Player, RealAudio… all these applications almost take over the computer when they’re installed. They’re heavy, they install themselves everywhere, and they only bog down the computer for little gain. Even WinAmp belongs in this category now.
• The worst is when you click on the wrong icon and accidentally start BDS2006 or Adobe Photoshop. Go get some coffee while the program starts, then come back and close it.

More and more, I’m leaning towards Portable Applications. Portable applications are programs you can install onto a USB stick, that require no further installation or setup in terms of registry settings, COM registration or anything. It’s just a simple, portable program: Plug it into a computer, start it, and you’re on.

My favorite application in this category is Miranda IM. A complete Instant Messaging client that supports ICQ, MSN, IRC, Jabber, and several other protocols. No advertising, no graphics-heavy application that takes over your system. Just a clean, small program that does what it’s supposed to do.

Truly, small is beautiful.