Hi team,
I will make the following premises about me (Ciprian Mustiata) and a designer
(John Merill):
1. I use Delphi and Lazarus for fun and always like the elegance of FreePascal
language and the power of Lazarus project
2. I came from another world, means I work with Opensource but I am from an
enterprise world, where one project can stand when is great from a lot of
reasoning, including design, marketing, help, updates, support
3. I am not want to make separation, trolling, etc.
The issue I want to put on top is Lazarus resemble with 10 years old UIs,
FreePascal the same, and they don't want to add value for the product is today
most needed. I've not means about Lazarus bugs, all software has bugs.
So, the eexpectations for a new user, (I put me in that use-case) is to get for
first time a wizard to understand what to do with Lazarus, secondly the UI
should be innovative, probably the best in market, to be consistent UI-wise,
to give me tools and as much I've don't need to be hidden, by my choose or
choosing a profile.
For making Lazarus to succeed it has to be UNIQUE and best from all. Means best
in the market, at least at his level. Lazarus' focus is on matter of today
approach is to add value by adding a lot of features inside the IDE. That is
great, still it has issues:
- the UI is not consistent
- there is duplicating work in form code
- the metaphora of it is like Delphi 4 - 7 (!?) resemble, means one top bar
with project management and components, floating windows for components, ui,
errors, etc.
What is wrong on long-term relation of Lazarus with Delphi:
- every people from Delphi's world think: I'll write everything in Delphi and
I'll rewrite in Lazarus to be supported on Linux (OS X, etc.)
- making Lazarus a worse image of Delphi, even it can have extra-features
- Lazarus is tied of innovation by forced to not use another UI metaphora, for
one simple user, Delphi devels using Lazarus, will use even less, cause the UI
is not the same.
Identity of Lazarus will make people to not think in Lazarus as the worse twin
of Delphi. Lazarus has to be best in what it does: it must be simple to add a
component, or to write a dll, it MUST provide a simple Wizard, even seems a
foolish from many view, that will make to be used in schools, it must have less
annoying bugs, that should be the BLOCKERS, not one bug in one toolkit. Lazarus
have to implement it's own dialogs using not TForm with strict UI rules, they
have to implement all dialogs from a TIDEForm, so managing the docking, etc. in
future by that inheritance.
Lazarus itself has to grow to a better IDE in terms of feedback, it MUST
provide hints, and make the UI responsive at least by providing dialogs that
say that something is happening. I.E. when an user say: Build Lazarus, it has
to appear in front of user one dialog saying: Lazarus is building... and one
Cancel button to press, instead making the user to have an unresponsive UI.
Based on that issues, and some more, me and that designer will not look back to
Delphi legacy, excluding the LCL and we will try to manage to make a fork of
Lazarus. The role of that fork is very easy: it will must provide bet UI for
user, and will not take care about users that say: "in Delphi is different",
because Lazarus is not Delphi, is much better. That fork will be maintained to
an external server, like OpenSVN one and hopefully when will get enough
substange to get it's own merit as an upgrade to Lazarus, hopefully will be
merged back to Lazarus code.
The project will be named LightZarus and will have the notice that is based on
Lazarus code.
Wish to you the best,
Ciprian Mustiata and John Merill
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