The point of comparison between HC/SC/MC/RR and religions is valid. If you read the Jewish Bible (whether you believe it or not) it presents a history where every time the Jewish religion, and its adherents get a bit "frayed round the edges" a new prophet was sent to get everybody going again - present the same message in a slightly fresher, more up-to-date packaging. We could see Bill Atkinson in the role of Abraham - the great founder-patriarch.
[By the way, I described Bill Atkinson's photography website as 'sad': the word 'sad' was not meant to refer to his photos - personally I think they are super - the word 'sad' referred to the fact that I felt a man of real vision had retreated into the "mountain fastnesses of his hermitage" away from the continuing life of the great avatar of HC - RR] Over the last few weeks RR has come in for some scrutiny and discussion of a quite different nature than the usual user-list fare. This is undoubtedly healthy and symptomatic of a "crisis of faith" that needs addressing before there is a mass migration of users away from RR to other RAD suites: 1. A question about who RR is meant for: does it have pretensions to be a "universal faith", or is it some little "gnostic sect" for an elite? 2. Is the "liturgy" to be conducted in Plain English or "Sanskrit / Latin / Old Church Slavonic" ? 3. Is there a need for a "person of vision" to radically rethink and repackage RR to prevent mass migration elsewhere and reinvigorate people's faith in the validity of RR right now? 4. Do the churches (GUI) look a bit shabby in comparison with the mosques, temples and so forth that litter the landscape? One of my criticisms of RR (the company) is that, apart from the fact that we know their headquarters are in the New Town in Edinburgh, we know very little about them personally. There is also a feeling that the faceless folk at RR don't have a strong leader who LISTENS AND RESPONDS TO THE DEVOTEES OF THE FAITH. Now I have referred in several of my postings to 'Princes of the Church' - but I really wonder if there are any official princes of this church. I also made a joke about Dan Shafer in a Cardinal's hat - well, it seems to me that Dan Shafer, Richard Gaskin and Jeanne DeVoto are as near as one can get to princes of this church (I'm sorry, there are others (Chipp ? and more) who escape me at the moment) - yet they also seem to stand in some sort of ambivalent position vis-a-vis RR (the company). I sacked a project-engineer who was designing my house here in Bulgaria because he went on his own sweet way without ever consulting me: i.e. planning a house for me, with my money, and treating me like a mushroom (keep it in the dark and throw sh*t on it). I now have a new project engineer who knows damn well that every penny is mine and I'm a mean Scot who won't give him a brass bawbee of my siller unless he keeps me informed and defers to my requests and decisions. If RR has pretensions to become a universal standard RAD then it had better "pull its finger out" (I notice that RealBasic is now FREE for Linux - and one can develop cross-platform with it - bl**dy fantastic! mind you, I have invested a lot of time and energy into learning xTalk - but RR cannot rely on people's knowledge investment for ever). I have a few ideas (which may be fairly naive and goofy): 1. Apple is having a "tent revival" session which could just blow the socks off Uncle Bill: the Intel-based Macs are just around the corner, and with it "Leopard" - Mac OS 10.5 - that will have both PPC and Intel variants. How about a cut-down version of RR with every copy of Leopard? Ring Uncle Steve. 1.1 I suppose each copy of Leopard should also be accompanied by a slim volume called "Intro to RR" so that users actually realise that there is a copy of RR bundled with the OS. 2. A FREE downloadable cut-down version: DreamCard with a 10-line limit? 3. Sort out the way the online documentation is organised. I still use the docs from 2.0.1 even though I work with DC 2.6.1 on Mac and RR 2.2.1 on Linux - RR should be able to work out why - they have been told about this by many, many people for a long time: slack, very slack. Personally I cannot see much wrong with the UI that individuals cannot change (recall my heretical versions of the toolbar). Of course if one relies for RR for what one's finished stacks or standalones look like they will all be rather "samey" and possibly not to one's individual taste. What is extremely good about RR is that one can go to graphic "hell" and graphic "heaven" of one's own free will; of course that involves a bit more effort than if one relies on RR's own look and feel. However it has come in for some heavy criticism so needs to be addressed. 4. Let the RR people come out of the closet so we feel that they care about their user-base (and I don't mean just for expensive jaunts to Malta). 5. Let the RR people know that they respond to user suggestions not just by implementing them, but by acknowledging them, both publicly and in the RR documentation. 6. Every school in the "First World" (Ho, Ho; there's another bone of contention) should have some sort of version of RR (c.f. idea #2) installed on its computers - and kids ought to be being introduced to programming using RR. Even if for the only reason that Accessing the Internet and typing "Word" documents are now almost instinctive to kids under the age of 30 (!!!!), and teachers are wasting their time and taxpayers' money teaching something that everybody already knows (except, probably, some stuffy 'educationalist' employed by organisations such as Fife Council - woops, personal peeve there). Personally I feel that HyperStudio ought to be burnt at the stake as a dangerous heresy. 7. Somebody could be employed to "strain" the use-list (even if only to strain out my "bl**dy" rants) for useful stuff to compile into a useful and usable reference source for RR users. Now one of the besetting problems with religions is that to convert to them one requires a leap of faith. Looking at recent postings to the use-list it seems that some people are finding the need for a leap of faith to adopt RR a bit too much. RR is not a religion, and does not require its users to believe in intangible things. RR is a way of getting computers to do what we want them to do, and as such is extremely concrete. Because RR is not a religion it should not require any leap of faith at all. To ensure that would-be users of RR aren't required to make a leap of faith requires the following: 1. A body of freely available example stacks showing off RR's capabilities. 2. Every aspect of RR's capabilities and how to implement/achieve them needs to be up-front and readily accessible and comprehensible to the new user. sincerely, Richmond Mathewson __________________________________________________ See Mathewson's software at: http://members.maclaunch.com/richmond/default.html _______________________________________ --------------------------------------------------------------- The Think Different Store http://www.thinkdifferentstore.com/ For All Your Mac Gear --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
