Interview with W.F.M.H., the publisher of the new language trainer Electronic Teacher 5.

AB = André Beer MO = Marcin Orlowski AB: Hi Marcin, W.F.M.H. is well-known in Germany surely only some insiders. Could you tell some more about W.F.M.H., what means the abbreviation W.F.M.H., who stays behind it, what history do you have? MO: Those of your readers who used to own Atari 8-bit machines may remember "The Top" demos as well as other games and programs signed by that name. W.F.M.H. is a short for World Federation of Mad Hackers and was founded in 1989 by Marcin Dudar and Miloslaw Smyk as the so called 'informal computer group'. For a few years W.F.M.H. was mostly a demo group, first on Atari 8-bit scene then, in 1992 it shifted towards Amiga pro- gramming. Some new people joined in (me included) around that time. Now we have something like 10 members, mostly programmers. In 1996 Andrzej Piasecki has released our final megademo and since then we have been only producing utility software. AB: Is the Electronic Teacher (ET) your first commercial publication for the Amiga? MO: No, Electronic Teacher is not our first commercial release. We have released many Amiga software systems for both wide range of customers (like polish localization package W.F.M.H. LocalePL, the non-official polish localization standard), as well as dedicated systems, written upon cartain orders like: gas-station management system (software only), hard-soft hybrid system for capturing, editing and processing of medical X-ray images and sequences, ordered by local medical clinic. There're plenty of minior projects either released under concept of shareware or just freely available tools. Most of them are available from our internet site, so I'd like to invite anyone interested in getting the software to drop us a visit. AB: Are the eTeacher developers the same like the persons from W.F.M.H.? MO: No, Krzysztof Jonko, the main of the Electronic Teacher is neither a W.F.M.H. member nor employee. In this case we are rather the publisher and project coordinators than programmers - Krzysztof wrote the the whole program and the only moment we put our hands on the code was while the release deadline was getting closer and closer and Krzysztof was unable to polish it himself due to some personal reasons. AB: How long takes the development of eTeacher until the first release? MO: It's hard to say, because there were a few releases of ET before. Version 5 is the first international release anyway, with version for German, Italian and Polish users. It took about 3 years to make the ET look and work as you see it today. And it's still actively developed. AB: Please describe in a few words, what are the main features of ET to being the best language trainer for the Amiga? MO: Nice you like it so much. I don't know if it's the best language trainer for the Amiga, but I think it's most advanced and universal program of that kind ever. The complete Electronic Teacher comes on CD only (there is no floppy disk version), and contains of over 640MB of various data files (now you know why there's no floppy version. ;-) AB: Do you think piracy is a big problem on the Amiga market? Is eTeacher concerned in this problem? MO: Yes, software thieves (don't know why people call them 'pirates') are a big problem (in my opinion it's now bigger than ever). Why? Mostly due to smaller software market. It's not a secret we have not so many active software publishers on the Amiga market. Stealing their products prevents them from getting resources for future work. This is quite simple and obvious relation (I wonder why so many people cannot see it?): creating any bigger product takes a lot of time and resources (mainly financial). Programmers are ordinary human beings - they have to eat, pay bills etc. So they have to be paid, no matter if they work on unreleased project (and any project is unreleased for a long time before you see it announced and available), that gives no profits or already released one. After the product is released, the publisher wants to recover the costs spent on the development. It takes a while before the product starts to give any income. So if you steal (for instance) our product, we won't get any money from you, even if you like it (by paying to theives you keep them going!) No money for us, means no costs return, not to mention profits. And I think nobody would like to spend a lot of money and almost a year (as we did working together with Krzysztof on release 5) just for your pleasure w/o any reward. Creating Amiga software is our way to live. By stealing our software you make us losing our money. And that might force us to drop the market, even though magazines will countinue giving Electronic Teacher high notes in their reviews (e.g. polish Amiga Magazine gave 5/5 and ACS 8/10). That's very pleasant people appreciate our work and consider our software worth buing. But it would be better if they start to buy it instead of just see it 'worth buying'. Without that the Amiga software market won't start to grow up (and that applies to any Amiga commercial software). Economical aspect is very important for every business. It's as simple as that. AB: Will there be any updates for eTeacher in the future? MO: Our TODO list is still quite huge, so there's no doubt we would like to make them real. First, the german users will get the free service pack for their English Grammar Handbook. Italian users may expect similar pack for itailan drills. And version 5.3 is planned to be out in the middle of February. AB: What are the main improvements planned for the next future? MO: It's a secret. Wait and see for yourself ;-) AB: Have you further software in development? MO: Yes, we are working on a few other software projects, with PalmSuite being most important now. The PalmSuite is the package of Amiga software for connecting, synchronizing and maintaining 3COM's PalmPilot connected organizer. PalmPilot is now the most popular handheld organizer available (with about 60% of market!). As any modern organizer, PalmPilot can be connected to your main machine for data synchronization, new software upload etc. Up to now, only PC and Mac users could take advantage of getting their PP connected. We plan to change that with the PalmSuite, which among basic features that PC and Mac software offer, will give some unique and advanced things. Take a look (both on PalmSuite and PalmPilot -> it's Motorola CPU equipped and it's M$[-]CE free ;-) AB: When will the PalmSuite be released? MO: We hope to have it ready for the end of the February '99, but I'd recommend visits to our WWW site (http://amiga.com.pl/) from time to time, or to subscribe to our announce ML. AB: Will your programs in the future also use higher Amiga configurations like PPC, GFX-cards ect.? MO: We find GFX card, FAST RAM and fast CPUs a standard Amiga environment. It does not mean we force you to have it unless really required, but none of our products refuses to work on such machines. PPC can give you the speed boost when used for CPU intensive tasks. Neither eTeacher nor PalmSuite is CPU hungry software, so you woudln't get any benefits from having a PPC version. AB: What do you think about the plans of Amiga, Inc. and the near amiga future? Is the release of OS 3.5 a step to right direction? MO: Hard to say. It depends if we ever see 3.5 and what it would be. After latest AI's releases like mouse pads, watches or other useful things, I don't have much respect for them, but belive me, I'd happily find myself wrong. Personally, myself I would like to see no more such 'wonders' revealed anymore, because it only makes people angry. The same goes for 'official stataments' (with an exception for AI-QNX alliance). AB: Can have the NG-Amigas also such a success as the Ultimate Multimedia platform like the A1000 in 1985? MO: We all know that hardware solutions available currently for other platforms are now more advanced than slow AGA chipset. But I think there's always a way to beat them, it won't be however as easy as it was in 1985. I hope to see any new Amiga soon (while "new" does not mean only 'with new sticker on the front panel'). AB: Would you finally make a generally statement to all ET and Amiga users? MO: I'd like to thank all Amiga users for still being Amiga users. I'd like to thank all our customers and Electronic Teacher users for their support. And as the final word I'd say to all: if you don't want your toilet to pop up with "General Protection Fault" requester one day, stay alternative. AB: Marcin, thank you for the interview. -ab-