Anything creative, purposeful... beautiful, requires a set of design philosophies in order to exist within a place of harmony.
Though for the most part necessarily technical in nature, Ots Labs has adopted an overall philosophy of design in which to steer the creation of Ots products—a philosophy which reaches out in an attempt to touch the people—human beings—who use, operate, see, hear, view, enjoy... the product, the media it presents, and the overall presentation its operator performs.
While probably not feasible nor appropriate to separately list all design philosophies within the Ots Labs playbook, here are several—in no particular order:
Purity. Ots Labs, when targeting the Windows operating system, uses the Win32 API exclusively. If we are targeting another system, we use the equivalent. Specifically, we do not use MFC, .Net or other "frameworks" which purport to "make things easier" but normally end up getting in the way and causing all kinds of hassles, incompatibilities, unnecessary dependencies, inefficiencies, and in general are not well suited to the kinds of apps we typically build.
Dependency-free. Ots Labs, to the extent that it's possible or reasonable, tries not to depend on external APIs, layers, libraries, codecs, drivers, etc. Anything that is a dependency, is another thing that can go wrong, may perform erratically, is not within our control, and can not be fully trusted. Are we control freaks? Yes, probably! Are we able to fully realize this philosophy? Obviously not, but it's an ideal worth aspiring towards and one that has stood us in good stead for over a decade.
Bloat-free. Ots Labs cares about the file sizes of our packages and executables. Ots Labs cares that our apps load fast. Ots Labs cares about how much data you have to download. Ots Labs is openly proud that our file sizes have always been considerably smaller than those of similar apps—especially when you account for the media that we have always bundled with our trials/demos in order to bring them to life.
Performance & efficiency. Ots Labs demands high performance and low CPU usage. Our apps have always been known for their outstanding efficiency, allowing aged (let's call it mature!) or modest hardware to remain dutifully employed for those extra few years :) We expect our engineers to go the extra mile to do something the right way, rather than taking a lackadaisical approach and assuming or even expecting that the average customer has the latest Core i27™.
Quality. There's no substitute for quality. Really... there's not! Taking shortcuts makes a mockery of everything you stand for—unless that's what you stand for. Ots Labs demands the highest of—within some kind of human sanity level limits—quality and workmanship, whether we're talking about audio & video output quality, coding standards, product documentation, the appearance of our business cards, or this web page! Granted, we don't always reach the lofty peaks (hey, I thought the business cards were okay!), but it's a goal, a philosophy and something we will always strive for in everything we do.
Reliability & stability. If it doesn't work properly at all times it may as well not exist. End of story—no buts! Okay, in fairness there is always the "but the customer's computer is faulty and has corrupt memory" or similar. The truth is this kind of thing does happen, and there is nothing Ots Labs—nor any developer—can do to absolutely guarantee prevention of catastrophy in those extremely rare scenarios. But that is the only but as far as we're concerned. One of our most-acknowledged attributes—even among competitors—is our world class stability. In summary, our products are engineered to withstand a bulldozer through their flux capacitor.
Professionalism. Ots Labs believes in your professionalism, which necessarily means we must perform our end of the bargain. Buying an Ots Labs playout system means you're buying something that has been engineered to help you to perform professionally in every respect. (Yes guys, that's why we don't auto-enable Beat Info chunks during initial scanning and creation. Sorry, but you'll thank us one day—we guarantee it!). In many ways this philosophy encapsulates every other philosophy listed on this page. What we're talking about here is you performing at your very best no matter the project or type of performance you're involved in. Our job is to make sure that all practical and technical aspects surrounding the playout system are top-notch. That's our ideal—we think we're not bad already, but we're always looking for areas to improve (and even more so, time in which to perform improvements in!).
Prowess. Ots Labs prides itself on having a can-do attitude. Always has, always will. It doesn't matter the challenge, we relish it! Technical feats we eat for breakfast :) Please, have a look at our innovations area after reading this page. Our reputation for firsts and leading the marketplace has been earned over a decade of pushing the boundaries—doing things everyone else said was not possible or not worth the effort. Well, we are still here... many are not. Ots Labs will always aspire to achieve any technical challenge that is worthwhile in its pursuit and fits within our vision, whether or not it is popular, considered impossible, takes a lot of effort and an uncompromising approach or otherwise. You name it—we're there... and nothing intimidates us!—have a look at our innovations.
Free-thinking. This one's difficult to explain without potentially being misunderstood, but basically, we couldn't care less about other products within our space, or so-called trends within the industry, etc. We have a vision, we have plans, we see the future through our own rose-coloured glasses. We believe that what we are offering is the very best and is also growing to become the very best (yes, at the same time). We don't claim to attract everyone nor are raw sales numbers near the top of our goals (though obviously many are like-minded with our visions as our following has grown strongly and steadily over a decade+). It must be stressed that we do care about what our customers think—maybe that's you—and we do take all feedback seriously, review all suggestions, etc. But a ship without a rudder is going no place in particular, and we are certainly not that! Our vision is probably our most exciting possession!