Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

Sun May 10 20:05:12 EDT 2015

There is no communication about any aspect other then widgets, which frankly, still look like an easier way to make externals to me, nothing more. How many people actually currently make externals? about 1% of the user base, probably even less. If this is increased 5 times by some sort of "not quite but similar to x-talk "language, that's certainly slightly better for the platform and the community. While also making some in-house tasks for RunRev easier, I guess. I don't care much about any of that, and I think the benefits are not offset by the pain of maintaining a second language.

Meanwhile the GUI is shoddy, documentation quality, presentation and amount is the same as it was ten years ago, and community interaction is inexistent or at it's best emergency-reaction based (like just now). There's no version that comes even close to 5.5 in stability. Which is especially sad, because 5.5 is at best an one-eyed man among all the other blind versions of LC/RR when considering stability. My last run in with quality was that the current versions in February could not be used as a server, sockets would just randomly work or not, where the same project under 6.6.5 worked perfectly fine.

Adding unicode is nice, but making all text handling slower by half (sometimes even 30 times slower) is not going to convince me to start using 7 (ignoring the added stability hit compared even to current 6 versions). Especially as the only actual difference for my needs is that I am not allowed to use uni-en/decode, but instead two syntactical different (but functionally completely the same) terms. Sure nice for non-latin scriptures users to have a slow version of LC just for them tho.. I guess? But basically, this is not what I expect from "seamless unicode support". Therefore, I consider the unicode part of the kickstarter unfulfilled.

The same goes for skinning. Promised as part of the kickstarter, this now sounds like a "can change colours" checkbox for the new widgets/externals. Sure is nice, but certainly not what I'd expect when I hear "make your own themes". Sounds like this is only for those people who want to deal with another scripting language, and in LC it affects only those parts that are compatible with widgets. Instead of adding community made themes to the "os 9 (emulated)" menu, or improving on how object style inheritance works, or any other approach to making themes actually easier, it's just gonna be some objects, made by some people, for some cases... Sounds to me like the same as it is now. I'f I'm right with this assessment, theming is not going to be fulfilled in my eyes.

Funnily I think what RunRev is doing is... ok... Well, I guess that's up for debate, but it certainly looks like RunRev is happy with the approach that they've chosen to make the LC product better. I just wish they'd get their act together about finally improving _how_ they go about things.

For starters, how about never, ever, ever replying to a complaint or comment with "We will eventually somewhen do exactly what you asked for" (seriously, never say that!).

Björnke

PS: Not fulfilling kickstarter promises is Ok for me. It's just saddening that I expected unhappy supporters, since the first day I heard RunRev is going to do crowdfunding. They're just not capable of communicating, which makes attempts at crowd-anything futile.

--

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