Well there is the big difference, you don't want to skin the UI we have, you want an entirely new UI, including new logic and a lot of new functionality, which is not something that I can just make happen by improving the skinning system.
That is correct. Also the UI you guys have is more than 10 years old, it hasn't improve much in the last 5 years, and I can't see what the interest will be for any user to work to just pretty it up a bit here and there.
Not to pour cold water on the idea, but just to tell you what the obstacles for doing that are...
Actually Jim, I agree with everything you said there. Those are the obstacles, those are the realities. Sometimes I try to place myself in your (collective) shoes (as hilarious as it may sound). "Why the heck they don't do it? They must hate it. If not that they must surely don't like us". That would be mighty crazy. Surely that is not what drives your decisions.
But that brings us to a very political topic. What does influence your decisions.
What follows is just my opinion, you can delete it after reading it, all I'm saying is that the events can be interpreted like this too. Some of us don't just want things blindly, some do think. They just don't think like you
.
Roughly approximating, you guys made a decision a decade ago, silently, to lay the foundation for going cross-platform. About 4-5 years ago was the first time when a public poll was made about what people prefer. Neither OSX nor Linux gained more than 33%, and if anything Linux came on top. What happened next? OSX became a development priority, between the new platforms. What can be read into this? Polls be damned we gonna do whatever we like to do.
Now for the record I care about OSX and Linux exactly zero. But I acknowledge there are many people using them and they should enjoy MC too, should that be their choice. Heck, if that gives JRiver more stability, more market share, more money, more whatever is good and cool, go for it.
How many guys are you there to do this? Mmm yeah, exactly. So then it takes 10 years. While other things get put on hold. Theater View? A war of attrition. Pictures? Psshhhh... IPTC implementation dated from... the late unpleasantness, 48bit support not really seeing it, reading a few hundred MB tiff locks everything (queue to the other
thread where interface locks are discussed); all 'good' here. And those are just things that interest me, I don't speak for everybody.
It might've been a tour de force for you all, a point to be proven, a goal to accomplish when so many others failed. You make better software than big companies. And while I would never argue quantity over quality, it remains a fact that your bandwidth is not the bandwidth of a corporation with 1500 people. So those decisions affect our time. Our waiting time. There are many great things to be done, and there's only that many that this team, as genius as they are, can do.
It was your decision that set things in motion like that, and it was also your right. Your company. Just don't expect to take no heat from us. The ones that refuse to be sedated into waiting years for something to come down the pipe.
I am willing to do a bit of work on improving the skinning options for Theater View. But we have to be clear on that: It has to be actually skinning current Theater View, and not implementing a load of new UI functionality.
Unfortunately this can be read like: we can do a bit of work, so you guys have a few more toys to play with, to improve what we think is best, not what you think is best. So in effect the only option is to work on something we don't want to deal to begin with. Besides the too little too late argument, I don't see how this will help anybody with actual skills at designing anything. I for one appreciate the offer, but politely decline.
For example from the XML of a skin:
<Item Text="[Time]" Location="*\***" TextColor="FFFFFF" Rect="Titlebar\80,0,98,100" Capitalization="0" Alignment="1" Alpha="50" Size="[Medium Text Height]" />
Can we put any field in the database on screen like that? Can I place a "x of that many" object on screen? Where "that many" is calculated with count across function? In summery, can we have widgets? See how fast this gets derailed?