[Tb] Tantalizing

Hello all,

I'm new to the list and thought I'd introduce myself. I'm brand new to
Tinderbox. So new, in fact, that I'm still evaluating it. I was
foraging for information on the Tinderbox user community and was only
able to find the wiki which, I guess, replaced the official forums. I
posted there on the WikiDiscussion page and was pointed here.

I was more than a bit disappointed at the lack of an official forum for
Tinderbox and so, was glad to find this list. Unfortunately, it seems
from the archives that the traffic is light and the membership small,
due in no small part to the fact that Eastgate does not seem to endorse
the notion of a public forum for it's product. This is the basis of my
remaining concern about paying to register Tinderbox.

I'm an experienced computer user and have been in the software industry
for 15 years and writing software for much longer than that. I am,
however, completely new to this category of software. So when I went
looking for something to help me organize my thoughts and stumbled upon
Tinderbox, it sounded so intriguing I had to try it out.

If ever there was a piece of software that deserved to be called
tantalizing, this is it. Every time I fire up Tinderbox to try it, I
find something so compelling, so absolutely brilliant in it's design
that I want to pay my registration fee right then. The thing that has
prevented that so far is that each time, I also find something so
annoying or sometimes even aggravating that I just want to delete it
and continue my search elsewhere.

In fairness, I must say that many of these things are just annoyances,
and some of them are quickly forgotten against the backdrop of the
brilliant things about Tinderbox. I also know that rough edges in
software tend to smooth over time and refinement comes in small
increments. It was with this in mind that I set out to scour the web
for more information from users and Eastgate itself, about the roadmap
for Tinderbox. This is where my problem lies. I can't shake the
feeling, based on what I have seen and read, that Eastgate marches to
the beat of it's own drummer and that paying customers are told what
they want rather than asked. It seems that many other users also begin
to overlook these annoyances or worse yet, accept them as quirks of the
program.

I would like to hear from some of the users on this list that I am way
off base here and that my concerns are unfounded. At the very least,
it would be nice to know whether these concerns are outweighed by the
positive aspects of Easgate customer support, of which responsiveness
to bug reports appears to be the most often cited. Lack of an official
forum, accusations of censorship on the forums that did/do exist
(wiki), and last but certainly not least, public postings by company
employees of the you-don't-want-that variety have done nothing to ease
my mind.

Well, I was going to draw this to a close with a request for opinions
about whether people feel their money was well spent. After composing
the last paragraph and before closing, I checked back at the Tinderbox
wiki to see if there was any updated responses to my post and found
that my posting had been edited by none other than Mark Bernstein. The
edit was very minor but it removed an argument in favor of a forum in
addition to a wiki. I'm not really sure what to think now but I've
just decided that wikis really suck for discussion. Comments anyone?

Thanks for listening,

Garth
Received on Tue Dec 23 16:22:35 2003