Hello,
L&L head honcho (and sole macOS and iOS developer) here. There’s not much I can say in response to all of this really, other than “sorry”, which isn’t really going to cut it.
Fair enough, I can’t really disagree with that, or with your assessment that this batters our reputation, which is gutting. I’d also like to emphasise two things:
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As long as it’s done as politely as possible given the circumstances, it is absolutely fine to post grievances and express frustrations here. At this point, it would be unreasonable of us to expect everyone just to “put up with it”. I don’t want people to think that the forum is only for praise (as much as we like that).
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We do care. We’re not sitting around laughing like Skeletor at missing yet another self-imposed deadline.
It’s fair enough to suggest that we hire more developers and so on, but the reality is more complicated. As Astaff mentioned, we have tried this in the past with very little joy. We went through two different developers on the iOS version, each of whom spent a year or more on the project without being able to get it to completion. We then hired a company specialising in building iOS apps, and even they weren’t able to do it to an acceptable standard, so in the end I took the project on myself. I’m still trying to find another developer to come on board and help. (There’s also the logistical problem of how we have no offices and are scattered around the world, making it very difficult to train up new developers.)
As for someone taking responsibility, it is unfortunate that the blog post phrased things like that, because no, no one is getting fired. If we fired our Windows developer then there would be no Windows version at all.
What we should have learned from the iOS version is never to give a release date. But people don’t like that, either: people want at least a vague idea of when something will be ready, which is why we originally said Q2 of 2019 (actually at this point I can’t even remember if that was the first thing we said - I think we said some time in 208 first, argh). Honestly, we wouldn’t have made the update free for v1 users from late 2017 onwards if we thought we’d be giving away nearly two years of free licences - we really thought that it would be done by now. But it’s not. It’s just not in a state we can release, with whole parts of the UI in Compile not fully hooked up yet. Which is a horrible place to be for all of us.
So yes, there are certainly some hard lessons we need to learn from all of this. But sadly there is no short-term fix. All we can do right now is have the Windows team keep coding away like mad with the rest of us testing builds and cheering them along until it’s ready for release, and apologise like crazy to disappointed users in the meantime.
Let’s try to give a little more leeway and have a little more understanding on both sides, though. It would be great if those expressing their frustrations didn’t accuse those defending us of blind loyalty or zealotry, and those defending us (which we appreciate!) should make allowances for the genuine frustrations of those who were looking forward to having a completed product by now. Personally, I genuinely appreciate how much all of you care about Scrivener. Thank you.
All the best,
Keith