Re: DP 7 Officially Announced!!!!
Posted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 7:55 pm
Splinter wrote:Apple does it. They do it because they actually do update their software with frequency... as all software should be. If MOTU supported DP the way they should and fixed problems as they became aware of them they'd probably have as many fixes and updates.bayswater wrote:That was your Grandad's versioning. No one can afford to do that in a niche market any more.Splinter wrote:My understanding of "versioning" was a ".0x" was a bug fix, a ".x0" was a product enhancement or upgrade (i.e. guitar pedal plugs), and a "x.0" was a product overhaul. This is certainly not an overhaul. Very disappointing, indeed.
It just kills me that people will bitch and moan about shelling out a couple hundred dollars for Waves WUP every year and when MOTU does it for the annual update, we all cheer. It's no freaking different.
Gee, Splinter. I thought you were one of the ones who paid attention in class.
Both Apple and MOTU have been involved in an undertaking no less miraculous in scope than a caterpillar metamorphosing into a butterfly. The caterpillar was the old legacy code that was once contained in the "Carbon" layer. Steve Jobs thought that companies would gradually rewrite their code in Cocoa when they saw the advantages to it. He was wrong. This meant that Apple had to maintain two complete layers of code to handle the two groups, and it was beginning to cause undue strife among the OS programmers and wreak havoc with Apple's deadlines. Jobs cut off Carbon a couple of years ago, quite unexpectedly, and to quite a shock for companies that were sitting on gigantic piles of legacy code. It meant they had to rewrite it all. Adobe was most affected, but MOTU was no less affected in comparison to its size and resources. Probably moreso when compared that way. DP6.0 represented a shift away from Carbon, but it wasn't complete. Now we're seeing the last stages. I'd guess that in DP7 either the Cocoa rewrite is complete, or very close to it. In any case, we're now to the point where MOTU can start writing FEATURES instead of translating 20 years of evolutionary code into Cocoa, which didn't always translate on a 1/1 basis. When I saw the magnitude of the problem a few years back, I was worried that MOTU either could not do it, or would throw up their hands and say "we're a hardware company now. You DP guys get out of here; learn to use Logic." Thankfully, that has not happened. Plus, they're starting to add features again.
But here's the good part: Once everything's in Cocoa, changing the app -- adding features, updating, implementing API's from Apple -- becomes a piece of cake. Even a single programmer can add things to the app without the risks of breakage that were once just part of the update cycle. We're getting a stronger app out of the deal. 9 years of hard work are coming to an end, and the majority of that work was just to maintain parity with what was there before. This means that brighter days are ahead.
Too many people look at MOTU's work from the wrong perspective. While we are not involved in their month-to-month planning, we are part of the process, and MOTU could not do it without us. It's like we tell them what we want, we agree to pay for the work, and they do it for us. They choose what they will implement out of what we tell them, but I can assure you they listen to us.
I came across a letter from Jim Cooper back in the late 1980s in which he was telling me how they were passing my letter of suggestions and bugs around at MOTU, and everyone was reading it with "great interest." He assured me that they would be hard at work on the things I had mentioned. Years later, in 1997, Les Quindepan told me "this one is for you, Shooshie" when I noted that the upgrade to Performer 6/DP2.6 contained a couple dozen features I'd requested, some of them major. They read our wish lists. They listen to our feedback. They compare with what's out there to compete with, and for reasons of their own they come up with the final list of what to work on. But there is no question that we are part of that process.
Then there's the money. Without our money, MOTU couldn't stay in business, and they couldn't pay programmers to rewrite this app again and again. So, back in 2000, when the Public Beta of OSX came out, MOTU could see --as we could-- that this was going to be a long road getting from OS9 to a version in OSX that worked as well as the Classic versions. We're beyond that now, but progress was unsteady, and I was always worried whether they'd be able to fix it. The slap from Steve Jobs was the one which would separate the wheat from the chaff. Either you were committed enough to rewrite your whole app in Cocoa, or you weren't. MOTU was probably already committed, so we're already seeing the results.
Waves, on the other hand, charges outrageous prices to maintain your right to customer support if you have to authorize their plugins on a different machine. They do not add significant value to what you already purchased. Incidentally, my investment in Waves plugins is many times that in DP, and yet DP is the miracle app. Waves plugins are marginally better than most, and maybe not even as good as some at a quarter their cost. I truly dread having to pay them yet again for what is only an update of their DP shell, which you'll recall they even set aside for 18 months and told us they wouldn't support it until one of our forum members talked to one of their engineers by chance a few years back. I don't think there's much comparison between the two companies. Waves writes plugins once, which they use for all platforms via a shell for each platform, and they make a fortune on their pricing.
Anyway, I wish people would look at Digital Performer more in the light of a community project and realize what has actually been going on, and that together we have helped MOTU to get over this mountainous Cocoa rewrite to make each upgrade cycle that much more responsive to our wishes. Just look at all they added to DP 7. I said that DP 6 marked a change of course, and that we'd see more responsiveness after that. Well, it took a while, but that's apparently what has happened.
Shooshie
