Supercard vs. Rev

[Chilton Webb]

First, Ken says...
> Hey, Chilton!
>
> I haven't seen you on this list; I guess you're just lurking, eh? ;-)
How quickly one is forgotten when they are quiet ;-)

I've been here since roughly a week after Rev shipped 1.0. But this is 
one of the lists I read in my spare time, which I don't have a lot of 
these days. For the last two years I've been working on a product for a 
client, the final version of which shipped this morning. So I've got a 
bit of time on my hands again.

> Tim Hart wrote:
>> I mean what is the hold up.  I don't mean to be a jerk but I don't see
>> how they could possibly miss their original announcement by 4 months
>> of just bug fixing.  What is going on?

> Richard Gaskin responded:
> I'm confident that as a long-time xTalker you recognize, as Mark Lucas
> himself has said, that it's valuable for all xTalk products to support
> others in different niches.  As long as your question is motivated by a
> sincere interest in using Rev 2.0 I'm sure no one here would accuse 
> you of
> being a "jerk".
On list, this is probably true. Off list, I'm sure he's received about 
as many flames as I have the few times I've posted anything that puts 
Rev in a bad light. Apparently I'm everything from a 'typical Mac 
(expletive deleted)', to a SuperCard Bigot. Hopefully he'll make off a 
bit better.

> Thus far the shift from Rev 1.x to 2.0 is moving faster than SC 3.x to 
> 4.0,
> so any problem lies more with Rev's rush to announce ship dates 
> prematurely
> than any actual engineering issue.
This is true, but there are fewer underlying issues they're faced with 
as well (Raney gets to handle the heavy lifting on the engine), so this 
is likely entirely due to making sure the bugs are worked out. Always a 
good thing, in my book.

>> Chilton Webb said...
>> I believe it's a difference in the demands of the users. Because SC 
>> has
>> been around so long, if SC4 shipped with *any* major bugs, it would be
>> seen a major failure on the part of the SuperCard team, so the
>> development cycle for this version was considerably longer than I 
>> think
>> anyone hoped it would be. But the finished product was worth the wait.
>>
>> SC's installed user base is not as tolerant of the development team's
>> mistakes as users are on this list.
> Richard Gaskin responded:
> I think you may be underestimating the supportiveness of the SC 
> community:
> searching for "bug" in the SC list archives brought up a few hundred
> messages, and the conversations there seemed very friendly and 
> supportive of
> Mark Lucas' excellent work.
Yes, but had he shipped SC4 with a bug that crashed everything under 
Jaguar, he'd never hear the end of it. Right now, there is not a 
shipping version of Revolution that is entirely safe in Jaguar, unless 
you can work with the old-style MacOS appearance for things.

> One nice thing about this community is that posts related to other 
> tools are
> never filtered out, so sincere posts with information useful to the 
> readers
> here are always welcome.
I'd question your use of the word 'welcome' here. This list is just as 
bad about flaming people as any other I've been on, the main difference 
is that the flames are kept off-list. Which is probably a good thing. 
But I've seen a few Rev users flamed by their own, for lesser things 
than pointing out the 4 month slip in the 2.0 release date.

As far as I know, the only person filtered from the SC list is Scott 
Raney, who has a long history of posting blatant ads for MetaCard as a 
'solution' to a problem in SC (while this is funny, it isn't always 
helpful). And it's not limited to SuperCard. He had a bit of a 
reputation for this on other lists as well, especially on Usenet.

Scott Simon's decision to filter Raney was at the request of a number 
of users, and not one he wanted to do, from what I can tell.

Now, it is possible that my above statements paint my perception of 
Raney in a bad way. But that's not actually the case. I have nothing 
but respect for his product and his abilities. It's his method of 
interacting with his competition that I find fault in, but not 
necessarily even that. It's more that he's very good at being a 
competitor, which is something quite lacking in the industry right now. 
One key aspect of being a good competitor is annoying your competition.

-Chilton