Joshua Coventry wrote: > This looks interesting but at $450 per license, that's rather steep. > Can you expand on what justifies the price? (obviously a lot of work > and time has gone into this, but apart from those factors).
To sum it up, unique value! First lets not over look the time and effort put into the FTC. I have said this several times before on this list that many people have started projects like the FTC, but have ultimately failed because they underestimated the difficulty and size of the project and/or over estimated their skill level to handle the project. So ask yourself what it would cost you to write the FTC? How much is your time worth to you? Let's say it took you one man year to design, code, test, and document it, what would your boss had to pay in your salary for you to do it? If you think about it that way, $450 is dirt cheap! Look at the alternatives, what are they? You have the built in EditField, the WordGuise plugin, RbEdit (from Excel Software), and a handful of small specialized EditField like controls. A while back I saw another project that was trying to create an EditField replacement, but nothing came of it. The FTC is modeled after Apple's Pages word processor, so it is going for the high end. Given that, the FTC literally opens the door for you to write a cross-platform word processor. I am not saying that is the intended target for the FTC, but that such a possibility is now feasible. The more likely scenario is to use the FTC to build in word processing capabilities and report display capabilities into your application. If you use the other alternatives, you get what you pay for and it will show in your application. I once heard a college professor say about writing software, "Beg, borrow, or steal before you invent brand new." I am sure he was being facetious about stealing, but his point was save yourself a lot of grief and trouble and use existing solutions if they exist. Given that, there exists no solution out there that filled my requirements, thus was born the FTC. Out of my need you can now have access to something you don't have to create yourself! The FTC has many unique features and especially with beta 10 and the introduction of custom objects, you can do things in the FTC that simply can't be done otherwise. In the next beta of the FTC I will be adding a capability which will make the FTC broader in its appeal (so stay tuned). Also note, the greatest feature of the FTC is that you get the full source code! This gives you maximum flexibility. On the negative perception side, I tend to find many who congregate around the RB environment have a skewed perception of what a lot of development tools out there cost. I think a lot of RB users don't truly understand the gem they have in RB! In my many years of development on projects with millions of lines of code and hundreds of programmers down to one man projects, RB can't be beat for the market it addresses. So you see the $300 subscription price for RB and think, oh my that is expensive. Try paying $1000, $4000, or $8000 a crack for some of the specialized development tools out there and you will begin to see the value of RB and what it can do. Likewise, the same argument can be said about the FTC. The value you are getting from the FTC is great. I am now nearing the end of the development of version 1.0 of the FTC. In my opinion the best distribution option for the FTC would to make it completely free and open source, but obviously I can't just do that. To that end last Monday, I send email to Geoff asking if he would want to buy the rights to the FTC and make it free and open sourced for the entire RB community. So far I have heard nothing and I have no idea why he has not responded. To this end, I have two suggestions for the RB community. First, open a feedback report asking for RS to buy the rights to the FTC and then get everyone to sign on to it. Second, if you really want to see the FTC be free for everybody, write Geoff and state your support for this idea. I won't personally create the feedback report myself since this would be self-serving on my part. If you want it to free, you have to ask for it, but there is no guarantee RS will do it, but it is more likely to happen if the community is asking for it. There is a lot more I could say about the value of the FTC like it has an full fledged RTF parsing engine that far exceeds RS's recent efforts, but I have to get back to developing the FTC and make it more valuable. The proof is in the pudding, so check out the demo. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
