I made the mistake of buying the Scrivener bundle for WIndows and Mac last year April .
Sales pitch in the bundle was that Scrivener 3 was on its way and you could upgrade when it arrived.
I think it is safe to conclude that Literature and Latte does not deliver on promise for what it sells and I am frustrated about that as I bought the bundle for a reason. I need cross platform tools considering the different platforms I have to work on.
The bare minimum absolute very least that Literature and Latte should do is to learn to be transparent and trustworthy.
Be honest and transparent on where you are with your development by giving regular (far more than annual) updates.
Communicate a date and commit to it. Worst case if you don’t make the date you communicate why you did not achieve it and what is outstanding.
You have V3 Mac and free access to the Win V3 beta. Between them you can do everything. The beta is very useable and the only area of major concern is compile, which works fine on Mac.
L&L have been very transparent with regular updates via the beta releases with a list of fixes. They have stated it will be released when ready. They made the mistake of giving a couple of expected release dates which couldn’t be achieved because of additional bugs found and have since consistently said they will not give estimates as a beta program is a moving target, it depends on bugs being identified by users and developers finding how to fix them.
You obviously have no experience with software development. Giving a firm date as you demand is dumb in the extreme and I could point you to Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, IBM Google, and many others who have done this and failed to deliver many times over and they have resources thousands of times greater than L&L.
Get off L&L’s back, enjoy the great software you already have and focus on more important things than bitching because the very useable beta V3 doesn’t have a full released version number yet. Let their two developers focus on getting the job done rather than wasting time giving you ‘regular updates’.
I understand the frustration. I don’t know what the exact wording was on which you relied, but it does remain true that Scrivener 3 is on the way, and you will be able to upgrade when it gets here. But, if you hadn’t been using Scrivener before and were eager for the full cross-platform experience, I can imagine that the delay would be aggravating.
OTOH … L&L does give an indication of the development process in the beta release notes. As for announcing a date and then communicating why it was missed … well, they tried that, and got about the same as what you’re posting here. It may not seem so, but it is actually more responsible for a developer not to announce a release date, because it is of the nature of complex software programming to be, well, complex. A butterfly flaps its wings in line 1123, and a unicorn dies in line 927. Release dates inevitably get postponed; or really inadequate software gets released right on time. Either way generates about the same, or greater, levels of user dissatisfaction as just not announcing. I suppose the smart thing to do would be to announce that the upgrade will be released on Feb. 29, 2024; and then when it comes out almost 4 years early you seem like a superstar.
Now that should be a rather reliable prediction for Win Scriv 3 as well, don’t you think? I mean, “this generation” should cover a few decades, shouldn’t it?
Remember, patience is a virtue and “Rome wasn’t built in a day”.
PS. About the OP title: What’s the opposite of shutdown? Shutup?
Expecting a customer to have a working knowledge of the software development process is both unreasonable and very unfair. This person has every right to be upset. People have been waiting for this update for years. I agree that they jumped the gun and have been very irresponsible in their promises.
It’s not going to change anything now, but blaming the customers for being upset isn’t the way to go. A customer should NEVER be expected to use a beta version of a software. If you know anything of the software development cycle yourself, you should be perfectly aware of this.
They’ve marketed and programmed themselves into a corner. Simple as that. L&L have shown that they do not have the resources to complete what they started in a reasonable timeline. After such a long period of time, it’s only natural that customers become irate and start looking for alternatives. After so much time has passed, everything becomes empty words.
I’m not trying to bash L&L here. I’m just saying that anything an irrate customer says at this point is perfectly justified. Show them more respect or don’t say anything at all. If you’re a developer yourself, you should know this. Don’t vent your personal frustrations out on your customers.
The main reasons they released the Beta versions as early as they did was that: those of us like me who work with a collaborator, where one is a Mac user and the other uses Windows, or those who use both platforms, would be able to work as seamlessly as possible without the Mac users having to stick to v. 2 until Windows v. 3 was ready; and those Windows users who wanted to help with finding the bugs and issues in the Beta could do so.
My collaborator has been using th v.3 Betas for well over a year now—I think I started looking into it seriously around Beta 10, and she moved up from v. 1.9 a few betas later—without significant problems, though our needs in terms of features are small … it is stability that has mattered to us and it has been very stable even though features have been missing, albeit ones that she hasn’t needed.
The person you’re replying to is not an employee of L&L, so they are not venting anything at any customers of theirs. They’re acting as customers in their own right, giving their own opinions back to the person who has an issue. Respect is earned, and constant whinging doesn’t earn much at all.
A customer doesn’t HAVE to use the beta. They have 1.9 which they paid for and the option of using the beta.
I have extensive software development experience so am perfectly aware.
Many much larger companies have taken as long or longer to get software to full release. What about Google betas that ran for years? Much greater resources…
Claims like this only make you and the whole software development industry look dumb, so I suggest you refrain from posting along these lines.
Sure, software development is one of the many industries that don’t have precisely automated factories that allow them to say “it will take 3 hrs 46 min 16 sec to produce 200 items”, but that doesn’t mean scheduling and setting deadlines is impossible. People working in such non-automated service industries use their skills and experience to estimate how long it will take to deliver the requested service. When setting deadlines and agreeing on delivery dates with customers, they leave themselves enough wiggle room for unforeseen circumstances/force majeure/illness/contractor issues etc.
Do they sometimes miss their deadlines anyway? Absolutely. By a few days? Totally normal. By a few weeks? Still not unusual. By a few months? Well, for particularly large & complex projects, it happens. But by a few years? Nope. That’s a sign that the service provider doesn’t know what they’re doing, or lacks experience and therefore grossly miscalculated the required efforts, or is hiding other relevant information from their clients (e.g., a solo entrepreneur struggling with time-consuming depression might not want to make this information public because he’s afraid of losing more clients).
Whatever the case is with L&L doesn’t really matter here – point is: your claim above sounds highly uninformed and incompetent. And comparing a writing software project run by two (?) developers and a handful of support staff to the likes of Google, Microsoft and Adobe, frankly, doesn’t make you sound any smarter.
(And on a more constructive note: For those of you who would like to see examples of how to create a cross-platform writing tool with a very tiny developer team and nevertheless keep customers happy, take a look at the screenwriting software “Fade In”, which is being developed by just one guy. L&L could learn a lot from him.)
Having been in computers and software since the Altair 8800, I have seen software (and operating systems, plus myriad hardware) announced ‘coming soon’ and taking years before availability or even abandonment And there have been major companies involved, which is why my Google etc comparison is very apt.
You were saying…dumb, uninformed and incompetent???
I am very familiar with and use Fade In which while a great piece of software is IMHO the nowhere near as complex as Scrivener so not a valid comparison.
While the Fade In developer is very competent at copying and in some ways enhancing the functionality of Final Draft, to suggest Keith & co should learn from him displays a lack of understanding of the relative complexities. I remind you, the complex Scrivener Mac and iOS have both been developed by one person - Keith. Win V3 by 2 developers.
If you take the time to read previous threads on the topic you will see all these claims over the extended development time have been made and debunked many times over.
We’re hopefully only a very short time from the V3 release, so the whole whinging exercise is a bit futile.
3DRealms made some of the most beloved shooters of all time. Some of the most smash hit first person shooter software to ever hit the market. They were among the best at that in the world, hammering home hit after hit.
Look up Duke Nukem Forever.
You might have heard of John Romero. If you haven’t, you don’t really need to take this kind of attitude. If you have, you know of his prowess and skill, and how much amazing software has his name attached.
Look up Daikatana.
Multi year delays are not the exception in this industry. They’re common, recurring events, which come when the software being developed takes seemingly small steps outside of the previously established norm.
And Scrivener steps way outside the norm for Windows software.
In short, your statements betray a stunning lack of insight into the reality of software business.
Fade In has a MUCH narrower scope than Scrivener. Your statement that L&L could learn from that is laughable. Seriously, you’re spouting off about things you do not understand here. There is no similarity in scope and capability.
Yes, Fade In is extraordinarily capable in its chosen scope. It is a fantastic piece of software, well worth looking at if what you are doing is screenplays, and nothing more. But it is NOT comparable, in any sense, to Scrivener. The scope of Scrivener is SO MUCH LARGER that there simply is no comparison.
Also, the core point of Scrivener is not that it is cross-platform. The vast majority of users are unlikely to use this capability (except between iOS and one of the computer platforms). The core point of Scrivener is that it leverages the platform it is one extremely well, at least in the case of iOS and MacOS. Removing that would remove one of Scrivener’s main strengths. Windows is a different matter; there is not much to leverage there. There, the strength of Scrivener is native code and good feature parity with MacOS Scrivener. And those are very good strengths indeed.
Maybe they didn’t have a very productive period, or the remaining bugs are proving harder to tackle and hence the betas are having fewer fixes. I don’t think it’s wise to create expectations when the official L&L it’s not offer any date or whereabouts… When they release the final version, whenever that is, they’ll make sure we’ll know, and I’ll have my credit card ready. In the meanwhile I’ll keep on writing on my old second hand MacBook Air.
I didn’t create any expectation, and don’t recall suggesting any imminent release, unless you conjured something up between the lines. Just expressed my pleasure, given what I saw as a good number of fixes from the issues I’d been tracking, and my perception of progress.
Meanwhile I’ll keep writing on Macbook Pro and Win beta.
