Joerg Barfurth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> Another example of this is the wordcount discussion. This feature is > important to a small but verbose group of people, mainly professional > writers (including journalists) and apparently students in some > subjects or parts of the world. These are people who are likely to be > sufficiently computer literate and may also have the time and interest > to participate here. But I assume that the majority of our users use > the program to write personal or business letters, memos and similar > documents and don't care about word count at all. Thus other features > with less votes may be more important to more users. > Joerg, first: thanks for all the stuff you have done. I like being able to deal with individual developers on this project, and try not to abuse the privelege. But the word count story is a bit more complicated than you make out. For one thing, it isn't important to some users. It's essential. Second -- and this important -- when I started to write a word count macro, there was no usable documentation on the API. It took me two days to write something that transposes two characters (a tiny macro which is indispensable to me, and which I don't think matters much to a wider audience). I could not possibly have produced a selected word count on my own. The first version was written, very quickly, and from the kindness of his heart, by Daniel Vogelheim, who is a Sun developer. So there wouldn't even have been a macro without the enthusiastic volunteer engagement of Sun developers. Third -- where the process seems to me to break down is at the next stage. The macro that DV wrote, and that I improved, really should have been easier to find, and in fact distributed with the program. I don't know whose fault it is that it wasn't. Partially mine, in any case. But I think we need to be better at harnessing the engagement and enthusiasm of volunteers. -- Andrew Brown The email in the header does not work. Contact details and possibly useful macros from http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/bugs/oo_macros.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
