On 29 Oct 2009 at 15:43, John Howell wrote: > And all previous versions > back to Sib2 can be opened in any more recent version, and re-saved > in that version for sharing files. The so-called insurmountable > difficulties in implementing this don't seem to have bothered the Sib > developers.
This is absolutely not a fair comment: 1. nobody has ever claimed that implementing backward compatibility in Finale is an "insurmountable" problem, just that it's VERY DIFFICULT, and fraught with all sorts of potential problems of a level of seriousness not to be found with changes to any other level of Finale. That is, changes to the file format and the engine that handles it need to be 100% accurate and reliable -- there is no margin for error when handling your users' data. Also, when you're dealing with a file format that was not necessarily designed from the ground up to be extensible, the problems multiply. 2. Sibelius has the advantage of having started life about a decade after Finale (at least), and thus benefited from advances in software engineering that post-date the foundation of Finale. It may well be that they designed their file format for extensibility from the ground up with the idea of providing backward compatibility. Or, it could be that they utilized a 3rd-party database engine that already had that built in. I think that it's important to compare Finale to other apps of the same nature of the same vintage, and in the mid- 90s, database programs mostly didn't support transparent backward compatibility. Even Microsoft did not implement that for Access's Jet database engine until the version released in 1999, Access 2000 (Jet database engine 4.0). If Microsoft with all its resources did not consider it important enough to implement until then, or cost effective, then I don't think it's surprising that a dinky little company like Coda would be able to leap-frog an industry leader and implement backward compatibility. One could argue that Coda/MakeMusic has had time to catch up on that, and I do hope that they have a project to modernize their file format with an eye towards making files at least partially compatible across versions. But there are lots of users for whom that capability has no significant value, so I can see why it wouldn't necessarily get a lot of resources, unless it can be folded into a larger project to modernize the program overall. But, again, because of the marketing department's decision to go to the yearly upgrade schedule, it's pretty difficult to budget a project like that, as it would surely need to span multiple years because of the project's nature (i.e., it involves the most basic structures on which the entire program depends). -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
