🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Jul20.230813.26811@kakwa.ucs.ualberta.ca>  
sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford) writes:
> Dear Next Developers
(Lots of excellent stuff deleted)
> 	Look guys, what you want to do is make something that is useful as  
> distributed, but isn't quite fully functional.  You are making it  
demo-able,  
> but not useful.  I have 40 users on my next cluster.  They tell me what  
they  
> want after something has been in the /Demos directory for a few months.   
Make  
> it more useful than painful and you'll get my PO.  
(More excellent stuff deleted)

YES!  I agree.  I may have a slightly skewed view upon this subject, as  
I'm being supported by NSF funds at my college this summer, but I think  
that NeXT should set some general guidelines such as those listed in  
previous articles for developers to follow when making disabled products  
and demos.  One man's creativity is another man's burden at times like  
these...and undoubtedly it will hurt the developer community eventually.

The following is MY perspective.  If you are likely to flame it, then just  
skip it.

I believe that if you write Mathematica 4.0 or FrameMaker 10.0 (with all  
the bugs fixed =) you would definitely want to disable at least some of  
the features.  If you write a useful appointment book app and expect  
people to buy it, then you should make it almost completely useable.  If  
you are not going to support your product (well) after you make it, then  
it should at most be fully-operational shareware with all source code  
available for others to fix your bugs.  No matter how nasty that code  
might look (directed towards an answer I received from someone at NeXT  
about Molecule...8^).

Enough said, I think I've made my point.  I'd encourage users who have  
valuable commentaries such as this to post them.  We (the NeXTDevs) can  
only produce good products if we know what makes people happy and still  
manages to keep us with a roof over our heads and food to eat.
--
Lans Carstensen
RHIT IFCYSEM NeXT Developer
RHIT Class of '95