Melda taking on OSX

[slartabartfast]

Apparently  the Catalina audio compatibility debacle presents another opportunity to chum the water in the Apple vs Windows debate.

https://www.meldaproduction.com/text-tutorials/switching-from-osx-to-windows

 

[antler]

First time I've seen a company advocate the switch in that direction. I can see why though; it seems almost every audio software company (and maybe other types of software?) are suggesting holding off on upgrading because it breaks compatibility.

[InstrEd]

Why do I get the feeling this is Apple preparing the fold for their new design that will be an ARM processor and not Intel.   It is not going smoothly

[Starship Krupa]

Receiving that email tainted my admiration for Vojtech and his products.

All of us have probably been around long enough to remember when it was development for Windows that was the grudging afterthought for cross-platform A/V software companies. It was no fun being on the other side with the lagging releases and bug fixes and documentation that said to hit "Command" this and that.

I say that if you are going to develop for whatever platform, either suck it up and deliver excellence or have the grace to do what Cakewalk Inc. did and admit that you don't really want to be MacOS developers.

Sending out an email like this suggests to the user base (which is something that Meldaproduction relies on more than other companies of their type) that you're playing favorites. I've seen speculation on the user forum about future commitment, and that's no good.

Microsoft's most recent major release of Windows 10 made my audio drop out and crackle, just like it did with a lot of users'. The truth is if we use Windows 10 or  OSX we are all at the mercy of Apple and Microsoft.

Suggesting to your customers that they change platform because one of the companies just pulled a jerk move on developers seems petty to me.

[bitflipper]

I used to work at a company that sold high-end software for designing printed circuit boards. It was very expensive, but popular with many large manufacturers.

One day, the company decided to switch from its proprietary OS to UNIX. There was panic in the tech community, as everyone was now going to need to achieve the same level of expertise in a new environment that had taken many years to acquire in the old one. There were seminars, training classes, books distributed. I myself took a company-paid vacation to Boston to study UNIX (I was already pretty well-versed in UNIX, but hey, a couple weeks out of town on an expense account).

But here's the thing: users of the software barely noticed the switch. For them, the O/S was just a program launcher. Most of them used dedicated machines just for this one application, much the way many recordists dedicate a machine to being a DAW. For them, moving to another platform was no more stressful than buying a different brand of automobile.

Vojtech is famous for having strong opinions and being stubbornly self-confident in them. Often, rightly so. He is, after all, universally recognized among his peers as a genuine expert in the field. There have been many times when users have asked for enhancements and he's flat out told them "you don't need that". Then 6 months later there's a new release and that feature has been quietly added.

[craigb]

I used to work for a company where someone decided we should be coding in new Object-Oriented languages and Unix (go figure!), so they apparently wrangled some education dollars from a government fund and, the next thing we knew, we were required to stay after hours and attend college classes taught by professors from Cal. State Fullerton.  Here's how things started:

• Imagine classrooms filled with already overworked, under-paid, uninterested and short-tempered people
• Add professors that seem blissfully unaware of the situation and teach as if they have months to spend with normal, college kids
• Include our "Zombie Safe"* programming manager who somehow thought she was qualified to teach one subject

Here's the result:

• For the first time in Cal. State Fullerton's history a tenured professor was asked to be replaced in a classroom
• We actually made another professor cry into his tie (then he quit)
• I ended up completely exposing our programming manager's incompetence which resulted in her being let go and I got stuck teaching the damn class!
• We never did end up using any of the new training ?

 *Zombie Safe is a term I came up with two weeks ago.  Basically, since zombies only eat brains, anyone without one would be considered Zombie Safe. ?

[Starship Krupa]

11 hours ago, bitflipper said:

I used to work at a company that sold high-end software for designing printed circuit boards. It was very expensive, but popular with many large manufacturers.

May I ask which one? I've been a user of PCB layout software off and on for 35 years (PCAD, Eagle). The first program I used ran on an XT with a color card.

11 hours ago, bitflipper said:

For them, the O/S was just a program launcher. Most of them used dedicated machines just for this one application, much the way many recordists dedicate a machine to being a DAW. For them, moving to another platform was no more stressful than buying a different brand of automobile.

That's not the case, though, with Vojtech's users. They're not all employees of companies who pay for the computers they use to accomplish a single task. And maybe they're using cross-platform DAW's, but maybe a lot of them are using Logic Pro, which is pretty popular.

To look at it from my side, my DAW system is also used for video editing in Vegas Pro, editing and mastering in Sound Forge. It's my main desktop computer. I watch Netflix on it. The computer itself was a hand-me-down.

To switch to another OS would mean dumping Vegas and Sound Forge. Kiss those licenses goodbye? If I were a Mac daddy (and I do own an iMac), I would probably be using Final Cut instead of Vegas Pro.

So switching OS platforms would mean at least switching video NLE's, and maybe DAW's. More money for licensing, learning a completely new DAW and NLE, which I don't want to do.

And the fact is, for whatever we think of it, Apple users do have that emotional connection to their Apple stuff. Apple hires people who labor over it to make it look and feel slick and cool and attractive and hip. We might think that's silly and that what matters is what work you can get done with the device, but from a business standpoint, it's counterproductive to antagonize those users. They're not going to "snap out of it." Not any more than people who like mass-produced pop music are going to stop liking it because of those "why modern music sucks" YouTube videos.

I'm not saying I disagree with him. Actually I agree, I'm kind of horrified that Apple would be so stupid and abusive to their developer and user base. I've usually been of the opinion that I really like their products and detest how they treat their users and developers. This seems like a new low, and it hits a group that has stayed loyal to Apple over the decades, even at their nadir during the early '90's. A/V production never abandoned Apple. Now Apple is needlessly messing with them/us.

I'm saying that my man Vojtech shouldn't take it out on his user base in public like this. It's mean and bad for business.

[Starship Krupa]

10 hours ago, craigb said:

I used to work for a company where someone decided we should be coding in new Object-Oriented languages and Unix

Because someone a box or two above Zombie Safe in the org chart read an exciting article in InfoWorld about how that was the wave of the future and everyone would be left behind if they didn't start doing it. ?‍♀️

One IT department I worked in back in the '90's, I swear, we fantasized about intercepting our boss' copies of InfoWorld and tossing them in the dumpster before he could read the articles and get any "great ideas."

Good lord, do Vice Presidents of IT go through conditioning to have the truism "if it ain't broke don't fix it" removed from their memory?

[bitflipper]

InfoWorld featured the same recurring topic in every single issue: whatever you're doing now, it's obsolete.

It wasn't targeted at rank-and-file geeks. I know this because all I had to say was that I was the CEO of my company and I got a free subscription. (It was only a two-person company, so calling myself CIO would have been pretentious.)

The rank and file had Dr. Dobbs' Journal. Thanks to that periodical I learned that the future of programming was LISP. And wasted a summer learning it.

 

[craigb]

27 minutes ago, bitflipper said:

...  Thanks to that periodical I learned that the future of programming was LISP. And wasted a summer learning it.

 

The only language to have more parentheses than actual code!  ?

I actually never used LISP, but I did code in the only language (still used) that's older: FORTRAN.  When you add decades of COBOL and the FORTRAN/COBOL hybrid  PL/I, I'm sure I wasn't missing much.

[mettelus]

5 hours ago, Starship Krupa said:

I'm saying that my man Vojtech shouldn't take it out on his user base in public like this. It's mean and bad for business.

I am not sure the correlation here. Given the track record of OSX updates forcing developers to update (or everything spontaneously breaks) comes across to me more as foreshadowing a possible, and potentially probable, future. There may come a time when the overhead to keep things operational isn't worth the effort to do so. The lead in to his article is to the point "Over the years, many users of non-trivial applications have reported compatibility problems in OSX and it looks like there will be even more reports in the future, starting with Catalina. This may be a good time to review your options and consider switching to a different platform." Again, I am having a hard time seeing how this comment is taking anything out on anyone. This comes across more as stating a valid risk for people to legitimately consider.

Most companies are not forthright in any way about business conditions... they cook the books till they go belly up and then leave everyone high and dry. It is nice to actually get a heads up from the people working the issues.

[Starship Krupa]

5 hours ago, bitflipper said:

InfoWorld featured the same recurring topic in every single issue: whatever you're doing now, it's obsolete.

It wasn't targeted at rank-and-file geeks. I know this because all I had to say was that I was the CEO of my company and I got a free subscription. (It was only a two-person company, so calling myself CIO would have been pretentious.)

The rank and file had Dr. Dobbs' Journal. Thanks to that periodical I learned that the future of programming was LISP. And wasted a summer learning it.

 

You should know that InfoWorld didn't start out as the buzzword-crammed manager's delight that it became in the '90's. When it started in 1978 it was much more of a hippie futurist tabloid. It retained some of that heritage for the first 5 years of its existence. It used to be sold in health food stores. Then it was sold to a larger publishing company and that was all over.

My friend Michael Swaine, one of the founding editors of InfoWorld, left to take the helm of Dr. Dobbs soon after. He unwittingly became the lyricist for my most recent song, "Half An Hour Ago...." when I set a Facebook update of his to music.

[bitflipper]

I became an InfoWorld reader around 1984, only because there were always copies lying about the office, so I guess I missed its glory years. My favorite mag was Nibble, which was aimed at Apple ][ hobbyists, which I was. That and Polyphony were the main reasons I'd go check the mailbox every day. A couple years ago I was doing some housecleaning and found stacks of both magazines in a closet. What a dope, I tossed them all.

Sorry to the OP for going so far off-topic. Did everybody get the follow-up email?

Quote

 

Dear customer,

the previous newsletter caused a little confusion among the OSX users. Please note that we are NOT going to stop supporting OSX platform. However we wanted to point out there are certain problems on OSX and there is an alternative.

We are sorry for the confusion.

Vojtech for your MeldaProduction team

 

 

[Wibbles]

Apple ...

[Bapu]

 

 

[InstrEd]

That's where my pet worm went off too?

[Bapu]

^ A fun time travel vid two steps up.

Edited October 19, 2019 by Bapu

[InstrEd]

That was interesting to watch Ed. 

[craigb]

I'll definitely watch the video later, but it certainly is missing several that were big in the business world (and with defense contractors).  Maybe all of the coding done in this millennium has pushed the scores away?