home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.misc
- Path: sparky!uunet!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!moe.ksu.ksu.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!usenet.ucs.indiana.edu!newshost.cs.rose-hulman.edu!news
- From: carstelh@NeXTwork.Rose-Hulman.Edu (Lans H Carstensen)
- Subject: Re: Open letter to NextDevelopers (long)(Flamebait)
- Message-ID: <1992Jul21.154507.24448@cs.rose-hulman.edu>
- Keywords: developers, demo, share, enough, to, eat, =)
- Sender: news@cs.rose-hulman.edu (The News Administrator)
- Nntp-Posting-Host: l130b1.nextwork.rose-hulman.edu
- Organization: Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
- References: <1992Jul20.230813.26811@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 15:45:07 GMT
- Lines: 43
-
-
- In article <1992Jul20.230813.26811@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca>
- sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford) writes:
- > Dear Next Developers
- (Lots of excellent stuff deleted)
- > Look guys, what you want to do is make something that is useful as
- > distributed, but isn't quite fully functional. You are making it
- demo-able,
- > but not useful. I have 40 users on my next cluster. They tell me what
- they
- > want after something has been in the /Demos directory for a few months.
- Make
- > it more useful than painful and you'll get my PO.
- (More excellent stuff deleted)
-
- YES! I agree. I may have a slightly skewed view upon this subject, as
- I'm being supported by NSF funds at my college this summer, but I think
- that NeXT should set some general guidelines such as those listed in
- previous articles for developers to follow when making disabled products
- and demos. One man's creativity is another man's burden at times like
- these...and undoubtedly it will hurt the developer community eventually.
-
- The following is MY perspective. If you are likely to flame it, then just
- skip it.
-
- I believe that if you write Mathematica 4.0 or FrameMaker 10.0 (with all
- the bugs fixed =) you would definitely want to disable at least some of
- the features. If you write a useful appointment book app and expect
- people to buy it, then you should make it almost completely useable. If
- you are not going to support your product (well) after you make it, then
- it should at most be fully-operational shareware with all source code
- available for others to fix your bugs. No matter how nasty that code
- might look (directed towards an answer I received from someone at NeXT
- about Molecule...8^).
-
- Enough said, I think I've made my point. I'd encourage users who have
- valuable commentaries such as this to post them. We (the NeXTDevs) can
- only produce good products if we know what makes people happy and still
- manages to keep us with a roof over our heads and food to eat.
- --
- Lans Carstensen
- RHIT IFCYSEM NeXT Developer
- RHIT Class of '95
-