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brokenjago · 12:16 AM

So I was reading Daring Fireball Today and he had a very interesting post about the one year anniversary of going Full-Time on his blog.

Among many other cool things, he mentions that he'll be giving away a ton of sweet software, Delicious Library included! Cool! You even get an upgrade to DL2 when it comes out! The Pro version! $80 value!

Originally Posted by John Gruber

Delicious Monster: 5 licenses to the upcoming Delicious Library 2.0 Pro ($80 value). Winners receive Delicous Library 1 licenses now, free upgrades when version 2 ships.

Wait, what?

So I take it there'll be two ossom versions of DL2 out there: "Standard" and "Pro." Pro is going to cost $80(ish), and Standard, an as-of-yet unannounced price.

I am in no way judging or in any way whatsoever commenting on the price point you've chosen for this product. Obviously you guys know what you're doing, and I don't. Especially since I don't even know wtf the features of this Pro version will be.

I was just wondering if you were allowed to comment on this yet? It seems like the cat's at least partially out of the bag (head sticking out, perhaps,) so maybe you could just let her (or him) roam free? Run kitty, Run freeeee!

Ahem.

So. Thoughts?

P.S.
Please don't hate me.

weldon · Mar 27, 2007, 10:20 AM

$80? I'm not sure I even care what the Pro version does. I can't see spending $80 on cataloging software. And this is coming from someone that is crazy about books.

Feynman · Mar 27, 2007, 07:58 PM

Yeah I'm curious myself. It seems like people giving away the software (TED, and now this guy) know more about DL2 then us.

I feel so unloved

brokenjago · Mar 28, 2007, 12:15 AM

Well, Will Shipley was the one giving it away at TED, and since he's the head of Delicious Monster, one would hope he knows what's going on.

As for John Gruber, yeah, I imagine he's more "in the know" that you and I.

A pity.

Delicious Monster · Mar 28, 2007, 10:39 AM

If it makes you feel any better, you heard it from Gruber, and I heard it from you. That's not confirmation mind you. I don't know what Wil told John, and I don't know what John heard. I don't know, and Wil is asleep, so all I can do is conjecture. And add smileys after every graf.

The fact is, we talk about doing all kinds of things, but talking about it doesn't make it true. Even writing the code doesn't guarantee it's going to be shipping. That's why we tend to not talk about things in public, or hedge. Even if I wrote the code for something six months ago, I'll usually refer to it as a planned feature, if anything.

Why do we do this? Because we have delusions of grandeur? Because we all think we're Apple? Nah, it's because we're crazy. One day we might have what we think is the best idea ever, but two days later we realize it's not possible, or not practical, or Apple does something, or who knows? The last thing we want to do is break promises, and everything we say comes across as a promise, so better we don't say anything.

Of course, when Wil is talking to someone he might feel like letting a little bit of tail or a snout out of the bag. If the press thinks we're selling ringtailed lemurs and it turns out it's just a very fluffy raccoon, well, you don't want to be anywhere in the neighborhood when Wil takes himself into a side room and tears himself a new one.

Anyway, the reasoning behind a "pro" version comes from you guys, which is to say, the users. We get all these crazy feature requests and we're like, "no that would make the program too complicated and take too much time to develop" and users come back with, "I know what I'm doing and I'll pay the money to see the lemur dance, so dance you dratted prosimian! Dance!"

So we think to ourselves, what if we called their bluff and made a "pro" version that cost more, to justify the additional development time, and had the caveat of yes, this is going to have more flexibility, but that's going to make it harder to use and that's a responsibility you are accepting.

The reason I keep saying '"pro" version' is we never decided we were going to make a professional version, what it would be called, what features it would have, or what it would cost. We talked about it, maybe even intended it, but at no point was it sent to the stone carver to chisel into granite.

But that's just the thing. "We" don't decide things. "We" talk about things, maybe. Wil decides things, often in the middle of the night, often while petting his fluffy cats. The rest of us, and that's "us" and in "you and me," are only along for the ride.

-- Mike

Feynman · Mar 28, 2007, 04:20 PM

So in other words what Mike is saying boys and girls is that, Wil Shipley is God and you are not

brokenjago · Mar 28, 2007, 09:26 PM

Originally Posted by Feynman

So in other words what Mike is saying boys and girls is that, Wil Shipley is God and you are not

That's what I garnered as well.

Delicious Monster · Mar 28, 2007, 10:48 PM

Nah, it's not that Wil is God, especially outside the confines of this particular issue. It is, however, that Wil is the one who makes decisions about Delicious Library, including what features to commit to the media.

That's the cool thing about a tiny company like Delicious Monster. Wil can decide things in the middle of the night and change the entire course of the company by morning. Not even Steve Jobs has (quite) that kind of flexibility.

But that also means news can happen so fast you might feel like the last person to know about something. Don't take it personally. You know we love you.

brokenjago · Mar 28, 2007, 11:33 PM

Yes, we do.

And I often feel bad I haven't bought DL, when you guys are so cool. Still waiting for DL2!

The brushed metal thing kinda turns me off.

Trejkaz · Mar 29, 2007, 11:30 AM

UNO might be able to nuke the brushed metal look if you hate it so much. It turns out to work for a bunch of other apps, so I'm just making an assumption here.

It doesn't bother me so much except in a UI purist mindframe.

What I'm more interested in would be the app picking up book size info from Amazon itself instead of assuming that all paperbacks are the same small size and that all comics are the same huge size. Autofilling series info wouldn't hurt either, as well as having a way to set multiple items' series number at once (auto-number 1...N.)

The worrying thing is that a lot of these niggling minor things are things which would normally be fixed in a minor release but it looks like development has totally stagnated on the stable branch. :-)

Delicious Monster · Mar 29, 2007, 04:43 PM

Brushed metal never bothered me in small amounts, like in Delicious Library, or in Safari. It's the crazy "giant window with a few checkboxes sitting on a field of brushed metal" monstrosities that have always bothered me.

I am almost completely certain I've talked the cover thing to death so I'll just say that picking up item size in the next version seems likely. Number in series is already picked up, however accurate.

As for auto-numbering series... it would be tricky. You'd have to have every item in the series and have it sorted by release date (and have the right release date) and all that, but I can think of at least one way it could be done in the next version, so yay for that.

As for the stagnation of the old branch, ain't no secret we're concentrating our efforts on getting the next version out. However niggling you consider them, back-porting features to a different code base in a different language with a different architecture linked on a different operating system would slow things down significantly.

brokenjago · Mar 31, 2007, 10:13 PM

Brushed metal never bothered me in small amounts, like in Delicious Library, or in Safari. It's the crazy "giant window with a few checkboxes sitting on a field of brushed metal" monstrosities that have always bothered me.

I'm pretty sure it's those monstrosities that you mention that put me off the whole thing in general. A pity