I haven’t any insight into how Blocs is constructed, but I imagine (given when it first came out) that it is based on the Cocoa Mac OS X frameworks, rather than how Freeway is built (MacApp on “classic” Mac OS, converted to Carbon on Mac OS X). Cocoa came out of the NeXT frameworks, and the marketing buzz around how they leveraged developers’ time (at the time) likened building an app from scratch using them to “building a skyscraper, but getting to start at the 23rd floor”.
Freeway has a quite different problem on its hands now. It has decades of code (and user expectations to go with), and anyone who has tried it will tell you that re-building an existing application is quite a lot harder than starting from nothing. Starting from nothing (well, from an idea) means that you incrementally grow the application in place, and your users’ expectations grow at a similar rate. If I sat you down with the beta version of Freeway that I first encountered in 1997, I doubt you would be confused, but you would miss a lot (a WHOLE LOT) of features and quality that you just expect right now. At the time, nobody knew any better, and so the problem and solutions were well-matched.
The temptation that Jeremy will struggle with at this point in the history of Freeway is to re-build every detail of the application, just as it is, using the new frameworks (and liberally importing existing C and C++ code where he can, to avoid starting over on every detail using Swift or Objective-C). Even the fact that he’s going to use Swift means that the ground is literally moving under his feet as he works, as the language is still growing and maturing (it’s only a few years old). There are still places where one must “get out and push” in Objective-C, because the language support isn’t baked yet. Yet there are things that the frameworks provide that, if he can take a true beginner’s mind look at the problem he’s trying to solve, will be considerably less work than they were in MacApp. The problem with that is that he knows–deeply and completely–how they work now, and getting back to beginner’s mind is frustratingly difficult when you know that much.
If Softpress were to release the Freeway X (like Final Cut Pro X) version of Freeway at some point soon, how loud and angry would the reply be from the experienced users? Recall when Final Cut X came out, and how the press was full of angry cries from experienced editors of “That’s it, I’m going to use Premiere”. That was an example of an application that had a lot of deep features, and the new version had maybe 50% of those features, if I’m charitable, and a workflow that was as “un-Pro” as iMovie. The pros, who had spent years understanding the mindset and workflow of the old application, were suddenly newbies again. At the same time, Final Cut X was a re-set of the whole underlying application, and it paved the way for even more productivity, and better results in less time, if you were willing to re-learn how it wanted you to think.
This is going to be a difficult balancing act for Softpress. They will need the new version to tick off enough boxes for the experienced developers, and to have enough of the magic that Freeway has always delivered so that new users are intrigued and curious enough to try it. But they don’t have to deliver the same application in new clothes, and they don’t have the time to do that even if they wanted to. If they stay close to what the Cocoa frameworks can deliver, and leverage the core OS features in the various *-Kit libraries, they may be able to build 50-70% of Freeway as we know it with a shocking paucity of new code. And that could give them a foundation to build upon, as long as they give it enough Wow to sustain a re-birth.
Walter
On Jan 19, 2018, at 5:58 AM, Ashley via freewaytalk email@hidden wrote:
Blocs is a one man team and he pushes out updates on a very regular basis with identified bugs usually being fixed in the space of a week. It’s not perfect, but I have faith in the general direction of travel.
I don’t know how long it took him though before version 1 of Blocs was released and Softpress has to deal with the baggage of expectation from previous customers, who will expect any new product to fly out the gate as a world beater. They could be waiting for a very long time.
Ashley
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But I have and am not amused. Or rather, I am amused at the concept of how much one would need to pay for MUSE in light of the fact you must keep paying for it until the end of time, thanks to Adobe’s wicked subscription model.