Shovelware
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Shovelware is a derogatory computer jargon term that refers to software noted more for the quantity of what is included than for the quality or usefulness. The term is also used to refer to software that is ported from one computer platform or storage medium to another with little thought given to adapting it for use on the destination platform or medium, resulting in poor quality.
The metaphor implies that the creators showed little care for the original software, as if the new compilation or version had been indiscriminately created/ported with a shovel, without any care shown for the condition of the software on the newly created product.
The term "shovelware" is coined with semantic analogy to phrases like shareware and freeware, which describe methods of software distribution.
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[edit] Media format conversion
Shovelware is often used to refer to conversions from one media format to another (also known as "porting"), in the manner floppy disc collections were aggregated onto CD-ROMs. Today there is potential for similar shovelware in converting PC websites into mobile websites with little thought to optimizing for the new platform.
[edit] "Shovelware" CD-ROMs
Although poor-quality collections existed at least as far back as the BBS era, the term "shovelware" became commonly used in the early 1990s to describe early CD-ROMs such as collections of shareware or public domain software. The large capacity of CD-ROMs — equivalent to around 450-700 floppy disks, the former distribution method of choice — encouraged producers to fill them by including as much existing content as possible, often without regard to the quality of the material. Software reviewers, displeased with huge collections of inconsistent quality, dubbed this practice "shovelware".
The practice of shovelware has largely decreased due to the limited capacity of removable media in modern computers compared to the growing massive file sizes of newer software packages.
[edit] Shovelware in the Amiga community
CD-ROM based games had little success in the Amiga market, since Commodore's CD-based hardware sold poorly and most Amiga computers couldn't make practical use of the extra space for games due to other hardware constraints. However, a thriving public domain community led some resellers to release compilation CDs, such as Hottest 4 and 17-Bit's The Fifth Dimension, collecting the contents of numerous floppy disks on single CDs.
While these CDs represented good value for the money spent, providing as many as perhaps five hundred PD disks on one CD, many such CDs were criticized as including large amounts of material without taking the time to check individual disks for quality before inclusion; rather, the inclusiveness of the material was often a selling point. In some cases, the CDs would be supplied with only a limited user interface, or sometimes none at all.
However, not all compilation CDs were necessarily considered "shovelware". CU Amiga's cover CDs were regularly quite full, but the editors were considered to be selective in their choices for inclusion. The Aminet archive CDs, while non-selective in their inclusion, were generally not referred to as shovelware, perhaps since they were sufficiently well-categorized and frequently included quality material. The Fred Fish archive CD was likewise generally not considered shovelware, since it merely archived an existing series of disks which themselves contained hand-picked material.
When DVD-ROMs came along, they took the role of what CD-ROMS did for distributed libraries of demo games.
[edit] Modern usage
The term "shovelware" has more recently been used in a more general sense by video game reviewers to indicate any product of disappointingly low quality due to a lack of time and effort by the developers. Additionally, many adaptations of other works, especially films into video games, are often considered "shovelware" until proven otherwise, due to their general low quality as a result of attempting to capitalize quickly on popular properties and content.
Shovelware is often bundled with consumer oriented hardware such as printers and scanners. Manufacturers try to add value to what are sometimes commodity products by including software to do all manner of things, some only vaguely related to the function of the hardware. Included software is often a cut-down version of the full product. Sometimes it is not possible to install just the driver; the shovelware must be installed as well.
Related to shovelware is bloatware, a negative term describing a program that has included too many features at the cost of usability, straightforwardness and use of system resources.
Recently, with the increase of "budget" titles for the Wii Gaming System, the term has come to cover the plethora of games produced with new, uneducated gamers as their prime demographics. Titles such as Monster Trux Offroad and Jenga are prominent examples of these.[1]
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