[Brian]

Originally Posted by D-Mac

I would strongly encourage The Omni Group staff to read the comments/posts in the TidBITs Talk forum post area of their website (comments to Matt's original article)

I've read them, and I've heard them mentioned in a couple of conversations, so you can rest easy. ;-)

Originally Posted by D-Mac

Also, if you complain about the behavior of various Cocoa widgets/code, that's just an excuse (and almost tantamount to whining). If the OS X provided widgets/code don't work properly, are buggy, or don't do what you want, guess what... write your own code... geesh... Work around things... that's what programmers are for...

It wasn't my intention to whine or complain. Since the author was specifically taking us to task for writing our own controls and not using cocoa controls, I thought it was important to explain that the symptoms were there, but that his diagnosis was incorrect.

In general, we'd love to fix every bug that affects our code, even if we didn't write the code in question. We have developers, but not an infinite number of them, though. ;-)

The drawbacks to doing this are that it takes time away from adding features that customers want, it makes getting the issue fixed less likely (by masking the problem), and it doesn't help anyone affected by the bug in other applications that use the frameworks.

Even worse, there are some framework bugs that we just flat-out can't fix - there's a crashing bug in the Nvidia drivers that affects OmniGraffle, for example. We don't have the source code to the drivers; game over. When I discussed the the calendar control with the lead developers, they told me that it fell into the same category.

Originally Posted by D-Mac

And, saying that you need some new feature of Leopard to make the GUI work is absurd.

I'm assuming you're referring to my original response to the screencast here? That was meant as a specific response to "why are these controls flashing so much?" Core Animation exists on 10.5, and makes it much, much easier to do some things than it is on 10.4. The UI works - but it could be better, and making that aspect better on 10.4 would eat up a lot of time.

While we could drop everything else and fix the issues pointed out in the review, we feel that our customers would be better served by working on the things we currently have on our plate, like machine-to-machine synching. We know this because of the amount of feedback attached to the bugs we have open on both sets of issues in our development database.

If the items mentioned in the review were at the top of that pile, it would be a different story. :-)

Originally Posted by D-Mac

If someone takes the time and effort to provide feedback about your products especially that which may be critical, you better listen and not react defensively or with conceit... most everyone who provides feedback actually cares a lot about your products... And, just because you've designed and programmed an application doesn't mean you know everything... unfortunately, that kind of vibe seems to be put forth to often...

I'm in complete agreement with you here; if I have put forth that vibe, it wasn't my intention to do so and I apologize. We didn't get where we are today by ignoring customer feedback. ;-)

To turn it around, though, it's easy for folks to toss around words like 'obvious', 'futile', and 'absurd' when they post here. It makes for a more enjoyable read, but often doesn't cover all the nuance of the situation. I have to worry about the perception that could create for subsequent readers.

Software development is a fairly opaque process to most folks; my posts here are intended to make it more understandable, and to attempt to correct the misconceptions that folks have about it.