csf,
With the software you have in mind, who is your target?
A musician? A tech savy? Or an average Joe?
Cas,
You address csf, but I feel some of your questions are also directed at me, so I'll answer from my perspective and hopefully csf will weigh in from his.
First thanks for poking in here - and you raise interesting points.
Myself, I am NOT writing software for the average joe. I'm writing my tools for the technically savvy - someone who wants to do very sophisticated things without a lot of effort or time. (this does not include time to learn scripting). For someone who understands programming in any language, I think the learning curve for what I'm putting together will be very small.
As you are seeing with Prancer, it is easy enough to come up with things that are powerful, or things that are easy to use, but VERY hard to come up with something that is both. If you are designing for the average joe, you will end up giving up power in trade for ease of use. I won't.
If your software doesn’t have a GUI, what are the requirements (knowledge) for the average user to create sequences? Do they need to know scripting? How long is the learning curve? I mean if they have to spend 3 months to learn scripting what they get after that?
for my tool some knowledge of scripting or programming is useful. But if you want to create a show with almost no limitation in sophistication, in a very short amount of time, then I think I'm building a great tool set.
I'm focusing on the fundamentals of design, and getting those right. I can focus on that because I'm not building a GUI. If I decide to start over in some part of the code to make it fundamentally better, I don't have to redo UI and window components. Having to do so would make me more likely to feel tied to a particular approach. Once the design is right, and if I have time and interest - I can add a GUI.
It’s awesome that someone is building something for MAC, someone has to take care of the MAC users, but again programming for MAC is like restore old cars, everyone love it but just few will use the service, basically you spend many hours on the software and because the target is MAC you collapse the target to the 5% of the general population, usually I look for 95% since I get more return for my bucks.
If the target is yourself then as long you are happy and makes your life easier then go all for it, it is an awesome sensation to create sequence with your own software, Also you mention Linux so the target may be is a tech user, if that is the case then be prepared to spend more time creating documentation than features, since tech user the first thing they go is for documentation.
First of all, MAC is an ethernet hardware address, Mac is a type of PC. You can tell from your post that you don't spend much time outside the win32 dev world. If you go to any tech conference where the brightest minds are working on the latest tech - you will see way more than %5 Macs there. This is not meant to be a Mac vs PC thing - that is long dead. But I'm writing software for people who are tech smart and sophisticated, and most of those are Unix/Mac people these days (just look at the recent Kinect hacking scene).
Mostly I'm writing this for myself. Second I'm writing it for script literate people who want to get into DIYC, third I'm writing it for DIYC people who want to take it to the next level while spending a fraction of the time working on sequencing.
Companies make specialized software and make a lot of sense for all platforms since on MAC or Linux is low volume high margin, but if the software is Open source what is the end benefit of it?
Hmm - vast majority of open source software is Unix based - so the above does not make sense.
Sorry if I sound too pessimist, I just want to make sure you have clear what are the reasons to create a new software, I may be missing something and I apologies if I didn’t understand your idea.
So may I ask, who is the target for the software you have in mind?
Cas.[/left]
To me writing my tools are about being nimble and flexible in creating sequences. I put up some sample code for creating a many-channeled RGB mega tree on another thread - I'm not sure how you could ever make something like that easy via a GUI:
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LoginI know that we have some similarities in our programs - but I'm not trying to reach the most people, or sell it, etc. But I also have spent relatively little time on it and already have a lot of functionality considering I only started several weeks ago.
-Preston