Fits on a Floppy

I stumbled across Matt's work via a post on Tildes. His "manifesto for small software" describes how he has targeted building applications that could fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Most of his apps are either Mac OS or iOS, which honestly shocked me that you could bundle apps for those platforms at such a small size. All this has got me thinking, and when I start thinking I typically end up changing my opinion on things. You see, I agree with Matt, "software has lost its way". My recent post on using Palm OS for weight tracking proves that. The extremely powerful database software I talk about in that post is 758KB, heck you could almost fit two copies on a floppy. For comparison, Numbers (Apple's spreadsheet software on iOS) is 617.2MB. You could fit 833 copies of the Palm OS app in that amount of space! Here's the thing, it's going to get worse. Much worse. When everything is vibe coded and built on the backs of bloated frameworks, the size of applications will continue to grow.…