Download Sizes: A Rant

I'm on a rant roll this week. Today it's about download sizes, why the hell they're so big and WHAT IN THE NAME OF JOVE IS IN A DECOMPRESSION UTILITY TO MAKE IT 29MB?!

Twenty-nine megabytes! I'm talking about Stuffit Expander, a program designed solely to decompress and browse the contents of .SIT archives. That's all. That's what, 2MB of code at most? What's in the other 27MB? Wallpaper-sized bitmap images? Tutorial videos?

And don't get me started on the SELL! SELL! SELL! nature of the Stuffit web page. You have to jump through several hoops just to get the free version of the program (or to even know it exists). It's stupid. It even has a LOOK! FREE* UPGRADE TO PRO VERSION! .app in the downloaded archive. Makes me irate, it does.

Contrast this with FontExampler, which is why I am downloading Stuffit Expander in the first place, since apparently OS X no longer comes with it. FontExampler is a 78KB download. Kilobytes. It downloaded in seconds.

This sort of thing makes me want to learn Xcode just so I can try to at least glimpse an understanding of why. I suspect it's folly, though; I've seen far too much bad software around for years, and I'm no closer to understanding.