From: sherwood@fenris.space.ualberta.ca (Sherwood Botsford)
Subject: Re: Open letter to NextDevelopers (long)(Flamebait)
Organization: University Of Alberta, Edmonton Canada
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 17:35:54 GMT

J.B. Nicholson-Owens writes
> >I have 140 MB in /Untested currently.  At 3 minutes per megabyte it  
> >would take a full day to go through this.
> 
> What I want to know is where do you get all these demos of things?  Or
> does this include things that might not be demos, but you need to
> attend to anyways?
> 
	Easy.  Around the fifth of the month, I download the 00ls-Rl.txt file  
from sonata.  Run that through a filter that picks out any files that are new  
in the previous month.
	Fire up bftp.  Set up a background ftp transfer for each of the files  
to run in the middle of the night. Bftp mails the results of the transfer to  
me.
	I also graze on comp.sources.unix alt.sources  and so on.  Several  
times per month there's something there that looks interesting.  (The latest  
thing is fping)  So those get unshared, tared, compressed and stuffed into  
/Untested.
	The reason it's so big is that I'm about three months behind. <heavy  
sigh>

> >	2.  Have the program check its own date on startup.  It will run for a  
> >week after that date.
> 
> This sounds fair to me, so long as within those two weeks anyone can
> run the demo for as long as they want and as many times as they want.
> And I'd also apply the demo rule of no saving, cutting or copying
> anything from any window but the Info panel.  I think that it's
> readily obvious that programs will work together if they save
> compatible files (like exchanging pictures in the TIFF format, text
> and word processor files in RTF [yeah, not the best format in the
> world, but it works in a lot of places], that kind of thing).
> 
	But that's not always obvious.  Example.  I needed a shape in Diagram  
that wasn't reasonable to compose from the existing palette.  So I fired up  
Adobe Illustrator, created the thing I needed.  I had no problem pasting it  
into Diagram.
	But I couldn't change the colour.
	So I made up a special palette with this shape (a rombus) in various  
orientations and in various colours.  A kludge, but it works.  The palette was  
sent to Diagram, by the way, and posted on the archives as a freebee.  


> Why must it be aggravating? It could just be that if you want to
> integrate this with other apps (which is pretty much a requirement for
> EqB), you have to buy the program.  Not printing or saving TIFF files
> doesn't get in the way.  It's so easy to save a TIFF (and will become
> easier in 3.0, no?) that you can rest assured that any program that
> says they'll do it, will actually do it.  If they botch it up somehow,
> take the program back and get all of your money back.
> 

Again, it's not how well it works on it's own.  It's how well it works in my  
environment. Particularly with vector based graphics, it's not clear that I can  
create a bezier curve in application Aardvark, paste it into application  
Badger, and still be able to manipulate the control points.  (Even if I had to  
paste it back to Aardvark to do it.)

It seems that we agree that crippled demos have to ride a line between being so  
crippled they are impossible to evaluate and being so useful that only 20% of  
the users pay for it.

We differ somewhat on both where this line lies, and the appropriate methods of  
implementing it.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.advocacy