eWorld.UI - Matt Hawley

Ramblings of Matt

VisualBlogger 2004 - I have some Truth

May 21, 2004 02:21 by matthaw

I would like to preface this post with the following:

In no way am I affiliated with Interscape or VisualBlogger 2004. What I will be writing is based soley on a discussion between Robert and I. As I will indulge your minds, I will not disclose any proprietary information that was passed on to me concerning VisualBlogger 2004. However, I feel the information discussed needs to be told, truthfully, and unfortunately its not come from Robert after more than a day of waiting in anticipation.

Here's the skinny...

VisualBlogger 2004 will become a commercial application sometime in July/August, price is unknown to me. The main reasoning behind Robert's decision was due in part that he spent 60+ hours refactoring from Beta 1 to incorporate the (uber cool) provider model. In short, this isn't a bad idea due to the amount of time that has been spent developing the tool.

Prior to becoming the final version, approximately 3-4 more beta's will be released to the public free of charge. During this time, the user interface will get an overhaul, more blog engines will be supported, VS.NET integration will be put into place and a few other awesome things (those of which I cannot divulge). Robert briefly mentioned having two final versions, one of which being a free, but crippled, version of VisualBlogger.

A lot of other factors came into play in his decision, one of which was relating to how the tool has become more than his intial plans of providing a simplistic posting utility that has VS.NET integration. The way I see it, is that Robert too initialy felt this to be a small developers utility, however didn't think of the big picture and over shot the initial plans by far.

Now...I'm sure there's more to it, as well as a definate plan for it, however it seems that we as a community are lacking that information. Robert, we wan't to know what your plans are, its that simple. Maybe after this post, something will come about, but until we see that, we'll just have to wait.



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Comments

May 21. 2004 04:13

Matt,



Thanks for clarifying. I've been taking some time to recover, and catching up from the last couple weeks. I was sick for nearly 2 weeks, and am quite a bit behind on some other things I need to get done. This is a good start, and i will elaborate on this in a few days.

Robert McLaws

May 21. 2004 11:57

"VisualBlogger 2004 will become a commercial application sometime in July/August, price is unknown to me. The main reasoning behind Robert's decision was due in part that he spent 60+ hours refactoring from Beta 1 to incorporate the (uber cool) provider model. In short, this isn't a bad idea due to the amount of time that has been spent developing the tool."

Erm... just because he made a design decision which turned out bad (so he needed to refactor), users have to pay the price? Smile Isn't that a little odd? (in general).



I'm not saying Robert should give away the tool for free, that's not the point, he should do what he thinks he should do (and a cool tool may have a price tag, why not) but justifying the move from 'free' to 'commercial' just because the developer had to spend a lot of time to recover from a design mistake is a bit weird to me.



Metaphore: I didn't make LLBLGen Pro a commercial product just because I lost 2 months of work because I had to refactor 70% of the code after 4 months.

Frans Bouma

May 24. 2004 21:37

VB2k4 will have to become a hell of a lot better before I'd pay anything for it. I'd barely call it alpha in it's current state. It's a useful tool to be sure, but the only thing that really separates it from other blooging tools (in my opinion) is the code formatter and lets face it, pasting into ftb works pretty well and there are a even a few freeware code formatters out there.



More blogging tools are adding .Text support every day, so VB2k4 is going to have to really improve to be worth laying out some money for it, and the price will have to be right (I'd pay $20-$30 TOPS)



That said, if it's a good tool that offers more (developer centric features) than the freeware tools and does it well (good ui, few bugs), I'd probably buy it. But that's a lof of "if"s.

Michael Cook

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