Getting it wrong repeatedly

[richmond62]

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And so the decline begins.

This is actually very worrying as it seems indicative of more than a slight malaise.

[richmond62]

A lot of people have already booked and paid for air tickets and hotels, some of which may be non-refundable.

I know where they should send the bills.

[FourthWorld]

I never saw a communication mentioning October, just the correction.

How long was the October mention up?

[OpenXTalkPaul]

It's like $799.99 for two/three days hanging out at a hotel talking about LiveCode, if I'm not mistaken?
I could drive there in about an hour, plaster some OXT flyers on buildings, and then go hang out with my sister and niece

[richmond62]

I never saw a communication mentioning October, just the correction.

That's odd, but I did receive it, about 3 days earlier, but, stupidly, deleted it from my email account.

If it is meant to be an advertising trick, it does still seem very odd.

[richmond62]

It's like $799.99 for two/three days hanging out at a hotel talking about LiveCode, if I'm not mistaken?

I went to a LiveCode conference about 14 years ago and did a cheapo by staying in a student room in Edinburgh, as
well as getting a reduction from LiveCode.

1. I could understand about 5% of what went on.

2. I still have the DVD discs from the conference which I have never watched beyond the first 10 minutes.

2.1. However my Mum managed to sit on the box and crack it.

3. I had a very good chat with 2 programmers about totally tangential topics such as being ex-cult members
which I could have had anywhere.

4. I got one glass of mediocre wine on day one.

4.1. I had a chat with a pleasant bloke who had come to the first, free, day out of interest and said he understood
little or nothing of what was going on.
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5. I was invited to a Non-Disclosure event at LiveCode's offices, and could not disclose anything if I wanted to
as the event seemed to consist of 2 parts:

5.1. Various people from LiveCode talked in highly vague and nebulous ways about up-coming features
that either I was too stupid to understand, or they didn't really know what they were saying, or,
quite possibly. both.

5.2. I sat on the floor in their main room eating 'finger-food' while everybody else politely stepped over the legs
of the idiot in the Scottish skirt on the floor.

I left early, went to a pub, got sloshed, packed my bags and went on to where I was going next.

So, unsurprisingly, I have never really had an urge to attend one again.

I am obviously as naive as a cabbage as my father, who was a Chemistry teacher (F.R.S.C) used to
go off to Chemistry conferences where all his expenses were paid. I would really expect that a company
trying to "push" its product would behave in the same way.

[richmond62]

Were I given the opportunity to conduct some sort of developer's conference I would run a series
of introductory courses that would presuppose very little knowledge of LiveCode/OpenXTalk/FredFintsone'sTalk
and NOT preach to the converted using "in language".

BUT the main difference between myself and the people who do organise the LiveCode conferences, and as
far as I can really tell between myself and those who are supposedly marketing LiveCode, is that I want to bring
people to the table from the beginning and show as many people as possible that LiveCode is far, far more than
a series of LEGO blocks one can arrange in pretty ways in a series of windows, and, while being ideal as a starter
computer language for schools, is far, far more than that, in fact a robust, mature programming environment,
while LiveCode appear to look down their patrician noses at that sort of approach; their "educational resources"
already presuming far, far too much of an understanding of how computer languages work than any non-computer
programmer (of whatever age) already has.

[richmond62]

I do feel that LiveCode are their own worse enemies:

1. They produce a wonderful product.

2. They continually run hell-for-leather to build in new features while overlooking a lot of show-stopping bugs
that have been present for years.

3. Their marketing only really results in uptake from a few high-end clients.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

I guess if they can continuously get a few high-end clients AND retain them, that would be good enough to sustain them as a company? If that's their only concern? I'm sure there are plenty of companies that survive like that for a long, long time.

It's not going to last forever if you only preach to the converted, and I don't see many younger people in that picture. I'm certainly not getting any younger.

In that 9-10 page "Goodbye" thread (the thread that certain people, who seemed to think response was "overwhelmingly positive", didn't see because apparently they only look at the use-list, or because the thread was deleted after a week) the notion that LC's move was like, or even could be like Adobe Cloud was touched on. I think that's a crazy idea, and if that's what they're thinking, in the long run they could turn out like Quark Inc. rather then anything like Adobe.

If you don't know who Quark is that's because they went from having >90% of the page layout market and being serious competition to Adobe for that market, to having maybe less than 1% of that market which Adobe now has probably >98% of. QuarkXpress was a great product for a long time, and for a decade beat Aldus (acquired by Adobe) PageMaker out of its early dominance in that market. It was highly automation capable with it's (xTalk-ish) AppleScript features, and so of course I was a huge fan, evangelizing their product to employers and customers even as that ship slowly sank in the early 2000s. They made some big mistakes with lofty promises of being all things to all people along the way (anyone remember their "Flash" killer? Or their WebPage editor? Or their eBook maker version?) and I guess it just snowballed. Bugs in their main product left unfixed for too long and slow to keep up with changes on various platforms, people just got tired of it... Meanwhile Adobe continuously improved their competing product and grew their user base. Quark still exists. I haven't even looked at that product in several major versions, legacy documents converted to Adobe (using conversion software) long ago.

The intl. corp. that I currently work for uses some fairly expensive niché market software that has been around for decades, doesn't have much competition, and I guess is too small of a market for Adobe to bother with. But the company who makes it has been slow to update, and I know people charged with paying for it that do look at alternatives regularly. In fact, just the other day I was looking at the website of one of those competing products that a similar company uses (that just happens to be hiring currently), and that product looks like it has all of the features we would need with a very similar (but more modern looking) GUI and I'd wager it costs less. I certainly will be talking to those people about it this other product.

[xAction]

Shame Quark didn't acquire Metacard and give themselves the edge they were looking for by piling all kinds of features directly into QuarkXpress. They could have taken the Quark app layout and made it an application maker and left the "page layout" stuf for QuarkXpress. They had a whole interactive button/scripting thing like Director going for a time. But $500 versus free Xcode...ain't gonna win anyone's attention.
They had a cool Xtensions feature that let users add all kinds of great scripting to the product before they bungled those ideas and tried to sell them as half developed features.


Oh they have an App builder add-on. I wonder what that's like. At $474 for the page layout software and whatever else for the add-on, ill never know.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

They had a cool Xtensions feature that let users add all kinds of great scripting to the product before they bungled those ideas and tried to sell them as half developed features.

Oh they have an App builder add-on. I wonder what that's like. At $474 for the page layout software and whatever else for the add-on, ill never know.

Yes they introduced stuff like that just as Adobe was about to eat their Page Layout lunch with InDesign.

Quark was great for me for a good 15 years or so, early 90s into mid 2000s! I used to be involved in a lot of magazine and book work, tons of pages and images, and between Apple Scripting in Photoshop (which was originally via a 3rd party product called PhotoScript) and the always good Quark AppleScript support, I had scripted workflows that pretty much did large chunks of my work for me! At one point I even made a HyperCard xTalk front end for it that pulled the job info from a web job ticket, parsed the specs from the HTML, and launched Quark and ran scripts, created a rule-up layer for proofing based on the specs (for web-presses, like pin-feed areas on old dot-matrix printer), and more, for some jobs all I had to do was put in a Job number and sit back, lol! Good times!
Meanwhile Adobe threw out lame old PageMaker and introduced InDesign and just kept chipping away, improving it every version, made theirs scriptable with AppleScript AND JavaScript!