Time out!
Time out!
- Subject: Time out!
- From: email@hidden
- Date: Sat, 12 Aug 2006 08:43:20 -0700
*sigh* stupid hotel Internet; I forgot that it doesn't let me send
using my mac.com account, so I went away for a bit and found this
sitting here waiting for me to change outgoing mail servers. So this
was more relevant an hour ago, but I'm going to send it anyway, with
another thought added to the end.
I'm starting a new thread here because I don't want anyone to feel I
am addressing them specifically.
I would like to toss a few observations into the fray:
1. A new tool will almost always feel like a clunky piece of junk
when you are already intimately familiar with another one that does
the same job differently. Opinions to that effect will carry more
weight after you have been using it long enough to have gotten used
to it; if you still have issues with it then you can state them in a
much more informed manner.
2. Being a volunteer project is no excuse for sloppiness. The Open
Source project I am moving away from has been seriously degraded
because of this attitude. Everyone always wants to work on new
stuff, or at least the areas that interest them, but if everyone
neglects the housekeeping because it's boring and someone else should
volunteer to do that, eventually the whole thing suffers.
3. For some reason, it has always been the case that people will say
things to someone online that they would never say, at least not
nearly that bluntly, in a face-to-face meeting. IMHO it is always a
good idea to imagine yourself giving your "feedback" in person before
posting, and generally trying to err on the side of being kind.
I have been online for a long time, since the Usenet days in the 80s,
so I can say with some authority that this list has been, overall, a
very positive place to be compared to many other technical lists out
there. It would be a shame if the as-yet unannounced developments
ended up destroying that instead of giving us all a common goal to
work towards.
janine
Added later:
After going away and thinking about this some more, I wanted to add
the following:
I actually volunteered to do this tutorial on Sunday night, before
WWDC had even officially started. I did that because I was sitting
there listening to Chuck (who I had met before) and Mike (who I had
just met) talk about Entity Modeler and it occurred to me that I will
never get the kind of support from Apple that I can get from those
two guys and the rest of the community. That is not a criticism of
Apple (not that they couldn't improve in this area); I'm not and
probably never will be an Enterprise level customer, and not even the
best-run companies can afford to give personal service to each small
customer the way a group of dedicated volunteers can. And these guys
are well above the norm.
I will confess that I've tried Eclipse a few times before and have
never been particularly fond of it. I found the UI baffling and
definitely not Mac-like. I always ended up going back to Xcode as
the "Devil I know and have documentation for". So it's not like I
have a particularly strong desire to use Eclupse, and at that point
in the week I had no reason to either (that's called a "hint" :).
But I decided to do it anyway.
So I would offer this thought as an incentive for those whose first
impression of Eclipse is "ick" - it's understandable, but the things
it can do are very,very useful and there are good reasons for using
it, the above being only one of many.
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