vote for mackie

[valley]

hm, i could have also asked: do you think, there will ever be a software without any bugs.

Not at all. Any non-trivial application is going to have a few bugs dotted around, and any that has to interface with drivers or plugins is going to be open season for quirks. That said, there are bugs and there are bugs. I'm sure people are going to find that very specific sequences of actions, or configurations, throw up unexpected behaviours, but the really clear and immediate ones should all have been hunted down now. And there were a few.

It isn't helpful to Mackie's release schedule (or Jules' nerves I imagine) if I, or one of the other testers, finds a show-stopper of a bug a day or two before they were planning to call the product a wrap. The nature of testing though is that this kind of thing happens. At that point, you can either follow the computer game model of ship-it-and-patch-it, or you can roll your eyes, grit your teeth, fix the bug, and let the schedule slip. Different people are going to see this in different ways, but personally, I'm glad that Mackie have the customer concern to take the hard choice.

I'm confident, at this point, that T2 is going to be a robust and stable application, and that future versions have a really good basis to build from.

[aldi]

and after all, in a special way it is still fun to answer (right greg ) that's what a forum is all about.

[aldi]

@valley : i'm hoping that too (robust and stable) it is important!

[valley]

James made the point earlier, and he made it well, that in many ways T1 was released as a public beta throughout much of its history. He was talking about the Mac version, but that was also true of the PC version for much of the earlier part of T1s' life.

A lot of that "there was a new release every day" nostalgia that people talk about was bug fixing. Jules would post a version in the morning. By the time the evening had rolled around two bugs had been spotted. A new version would follow either that eveniong, or the following morning, and we'd all feel like that "downloading : 5kbps" message never left our screen...

The bottom line is though that you just can't do that with a CD release. The CD has to be as damn near perfect as it can be. That means long lead times and closed beta programs. It *does* also slow the development rate, but it makes it more stable and manageable.

[aldi]

and 2kbps at new features