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I feel you on your dismissiveness, I had the same reaction years ago. Even using modern Windows UI (which it does) doesn't improve things that much though. Of t
by Jach 5y ago
I feel you on your dismissiveness, I had the same reaction years ago. Even using modern Windows UI (which it does) doesn't improve things that much though. Of the two, I like Allegro's UI a bit more, but it's still dated. I haven't convinced myself to buy a license for either of them, and I don't get the sense that for either of them their IDE is anything close to a cash cow, and hence there's little motivation to invest more effort into it or even updating the screenshot.
But if I were running a business using Lisp, I'd cough up licenses for employees if they wanted to use one (and encourage them to try the free demos if they're new and aren't sold on emacs or vim or one of the other newer plugins for VS Code/Atom/Sublime). It's similar to how many Java shops cough up licenses for IntelliJ, except JetBrains has a sane business model that's not straight out of the 90s, you can trust they'll continue to make improvements to it and not drop a Big Update at some point that you have to debate whether to pay for, and for both an organization or an individual it's very affordable.
- overgard 5y agoI don't think I'm being dismissive. Windows XP came out 20 years ago, and it's been practically out of use for a decade. Things like that scream "unmaintained"
- pjmlp 5y agoThis is commercial software, not something that a dev dropped into github and left untouched. Most likely their customers don't use the screenshots on their buying decisions.
- Thiez 5y agoWhen you ask $3000 per license surely updating those few screenshots once every few years is worth it if it generates even a single sale.
- lispm 5y agoI use LispWorks on Apple's current OS (Big Sur) and on a current Linux. The IDE picks up newer looks in many respects, since it uses a native graphics backend (Cocoa, Windows, GTK). If a new OS would cause UI problems, they would fix that. Usually just shipping tiny patches of compiled Lisp code.
- Jach 5y agoIt takes a bit more than one screenshot for me to think "unmaintained", like one click to the Support page and another click for details on a bullet item takes me to https://franz.com/support/apple_silicon.lhtml https://franz.com/support/apple_silicon.lhtml and I'm at least assuaged that it isn't abandonware even though I'm not an Apple user. But in any case I still get a bad feeling from the ancient images and sympathize with similar negative reactions, whatever they are in detail; for you it's a sense of being unmaintained and for me it's a sense that they don't care very much about the product and aren't interested in attracting new customers. And this is just from the window chrome, looking at what the screenshots actually depict produces another set of emotions that I don't think anyone at either company cares about exploring. At least LispWorks' has syntax highlighting... (In case any employee happens to catch this, take a look at https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ and compare.)
- TurboHaskal 5y agoI do feel the same but let's face it, no amount of PR magic will make them attract new, young developers.
- eschaton 5y agoImagine a venerable tool in the late 1990s using a screenshot of the tool in use in the late 1970s as part of its marketing campaign.
- lispm 5y agoFranz is also going to offer the Allegro CL IDE to be used in the web browser, soon.