Just purchased 5.0

[schferk]

Again, my irony has been lost...

But seriously, in the outliner forum they whine about contenders closing down, the world is bad and cruel, etc. ... and today or yesterday, they considered bitsdujour offerings, - 35 % vs. - 50 %, musing if it was reasonable or not to decide SOLELY on the respective price. Bitdujour takes 50 % of the price users pay, and that is after the usual processing fees of the payment organizations. So a program that is 50 bucks, offered with 50 % off, is ELEVEN BUCKS for the developer.

As you can see here, those people ain't serious, and ain't coherent in what they want, and it's so evident their stance doesn't hold... (More details in my white paper here.)

In that white paper, I spoke of Thunderbird vs. Outlook, the latter being integrated in some way into UR. I more or less touted TB but from a layman's pov. I tried to import my stuff into TB (from various accounts in the web). I encountered BIG BUGS almost immediately, so I tried OL - and it worked!

Of course, there are a lot of potential probs with OL, especially so when your mail goes into tens of thousands, and filing your mails with OL alone is a pain, OL's "rules" being a joke... but all these probs have been handled by lots of people, long ago, i.e. there is sort of a very large knowledge base, spread over the web of course, and there are lots of ridiculous (and often ridiculously priced) add-ins, but also some add-ins that are certainly worth their money.

So their is a real ecosystem around and behind OL, so if you are willing to buy OL, and to buy add-ins that will double the price, you can have a fine system that will do LOTS of things you want it to do.

(On the other hand, a specialised offering like "The Bat!" seems to have a very rude developer, and seems to be buggy like hell, those bugs not being exterminated for many years now - details can be found on donationcoder.)

So, for the last 3 weeks or so, I have been using OL, after having discarded TB very quickly (= one afternoon).

It's TODAY - and that's the reason I'm writing here - that I see that TB will not be further developed, and that in fact they have ceased development some six months ago.

My reason to discard TB some 3 weeks ago was to encounter these big bugs, and I said to myself, they are doing this for a very long time now, so if there are so big and evident bugs you encounter after 10 minutes trying to "work" with that program, that's not for me - that's amateur work.

Now, I see that I was perfectly right in "going back" to OL, even when my overall opinion of MS is so bad.

At this time, virtually every developer is either "going cloud" or more or less "closing business", i.e. doing the strict minimum in order to not lose his customer base altogether, but he's not investing in big new functionality into traditional sw anymore.

So my last post above was right on the spot, as TB proves today, and sadly, UR users should get accustomed to the fact that their beloved sw will not be spiced up with really big things, to say the least - well, that's my presumption, not official kinook fact.

Another example - far away from outliners - is ViceVersa, my preferred synch tool. You wouldn't imagine they did introduce "smart" processing of renamed folders / files, let alone delta copying, and "all" their loyal (and rather high-paying) users asking for such features for years now? They simply don't do it, pretending it's too difficult (when even free contenders do it), only one month ago. The simple fact, but which nobody seems to be able to address, is: Business is taken over by cloud services, so for the respective developers, it's simply not worthwile anymore.

The irony here is that I'm cloud-adverse and always have been, but then, that's no reason to not see what's going on, and hence a far better understanding of our deepening disappointment in our general sw environment if I may say so.

If we want traditional sw, we're bound to have it from some traditional developers (i.e. OL, not TB, apart from the latter's being buggy), and we must fear that we'll get it for a very short time only; then, we can only pray that our "residual sw" will work on further operating systems, as-it-is, or we'll buy old pc's for the remaining of our lifetime - and let's face it, for many of us around here that's a perfectly viable alternative.

Two days ago, I had some more info about Win8, and, frankly, it's so much of another piece of sh** (= after those 2 MS slates revealed some days ago that ain't worth anything) that I was so shocked that I bought another (used) XP laptop (1,3 kg, 12,1", 10 hours with special battery, neat, tiny and slick, and with a keyboard).

As for mail, in the future, most people will go for something like Google, which is to say that Google, and the usual secret services, will have total access to ALL you write, design, exchange with your business contacts or prepare in order to get that contract, whatever, and here and then, a thousand or so of your mail or other files will get lost, and you'll start anew.

Wasn't it for my scripting capabilities, I'd leave my 30-years MS / "Win" ecosystem altogether for that competing one by that corpse from Cupertino I hate - with all this "new deal" they force upon us anyway, you can as well resign yourself to the "original", don't need to do with a LESSER system but that won't offer you any more specific advantages, i.e. "Windows" is as dead as it gets, and in the future will not even provide you file processing on your own hardware, or then, processed by sw that are many years old - in fact, I know what that means:

Owning several "modern" editors, I do most of my editing work with "The Semware Editor", it having some special functions I'm in need of; another example: I bought Adobe Illustrator, only to shelve it, and I do my work with the last version of Freehand, which is now more than 10 years old (Adobe bought it in order to bury it, so that their own inferior prog was sole on the market).

That FH example is a very instructive one since I also use, here and then, FH 4, which is about 20 or 25 years old (bought it back then), whilst the intermediate versions can not be installed on XP...

So all of yours who prefer to work with traditional sw face exactly this dilemma now and for the years to come, and I can only urge you to do as described here, instead of giving all your competitive knowledge over to the authorities, and your bigger contenders which will be at the receiving end of that total sellout.

Since most people don't even need these collaborative functionality they are so fond of, it must be the "new girl in town" effect - people simply did work too long with traditional sw: long enough in order to have seen they just have to think for themselves, as in old times, 30 years of sw use notwithstanding. So they conjure up a breath of fresh air to their mostly suboptimal thinking by cloud services now... will take another 10 or more years, I'm sure, before they realize that their thinking quality will not be enhanced by writing their thoughts to the cloud either.

As for my white paper, Win slates will come, so UR stylus operation will be of highest interest, and hence the interest of UR adopting my "first 20 %, last 20 %, all the rest of a line" space triggering different commands.

And no, I don't pretend to be mother teresa, it's simply that I introduced that concept 15 years in a sw only marketed in Germany at that time, and I'm afraid some thief with money will take a US patent on this (since it's of high interest for slates), so that in the future, in programs of my own, I won't even be allowed to use my own GUI specifics I had found and adopted in the late Nineties.

Sharing your ideas is one thing; not even owning your own ideas anymore is quite another.

I think that even within the above-described framework, a UR slate version won't be too much work and could bring some good to kinook, notwithstanding my staying with my file M system and that crappy, very basic outliner that doesn't even dare speak his name in a UR environment.

Metta, know that the "Brain" people are heavy, fast censors; I could have told you so long ago, and in the outliner forum it's freshly related by people that nobody would ever suspect to be censored anywhere.

And I think their graphical representation of things that at first sight literally enchants you, quickly loses its promise once you get real stuff in it (i.e. in realistic quantity also). Yes, they display some monster "brains", but you wouldn't expect to be able to do effective - or just real, even inefficiently - work with those?

Yeah, let's get real: In 5 years, most of yours won't work with anything else but cloud applics, and with the "Brain" people reading some of yours' stuff.