[TxMt] Re: TM2 in the Vaporware Awards

[Allan Odgaard]

On 23 Dec 2009, at 16:17, King, Steven wrote:

> [...]
> It's been a full three years since Allan announced that TM2 would be  
> Leopard-only, which led to a lot of speculation that it would be out  
> sometime near Leopard's release. [...]

Not sure if I have stated this before (I feel I have repeated this a  
hundred times, but probably in private emails, blog comments, etc.)  
but my “announcement” was not meant to announce TM2 it was meant to  
say “starting with 2.0 I will no longer care about backwards  
compatibility”. With 1.x I kept Panther compatibility until Apple made  
it very difficult for me to still do Panther builds (due to the  
introduction of universal builds), and the blog post was meant to say  
“this policy will change when I start on 2.0” motivated by me having  
just been to WWDC ’06 and seen what Leopard would provide.

Since I had mentioned this in less formal contexts and got a few  
negative comments about that, I figured I’d make a real announcement  
about this compatibility change to a) test the waters and b) be sure  
this message was clearly stated — no single line of code was written  
related to 2.0 when I wrote that blog post.

In retrospect it was a huge mistake to make that blog post, and the  
backlash sure hasn’t added to my eagerness in posting anything that  
can be seen as statements about the future.

> I don't know exactly when Allan started working on it, but it's  
> clear that it's been in development for well over three years now.  
> Sounds like it's a wonderful example of letting "perfect" become the  
> enemy of "good".

I did some work in 2007, but most of 2007 was really spent  
“relaxing” (and travelling) from having worked 3 years straight on 1.x  
with no vacation — the stuff I did produce in 2007 was insignificant.

So february 2008 is when I really started 2.0. It was a complete  
rewrite, and it’s more an example of how rewrites are bad and software  
is hard.

That said, while I probably underestimated how long time it takes to  
rewrite 1.x (one always do when estimating how long it takes to code  
something), I certainly do not regret this rewrite. What I do regret  
is that I didn’t figure out a way to have periodic updates to the 1.x  
line while I could isolate myself and work on 2.0 — but hindsight is  
20/20.

> I'd say it's perfectly fair to place TM2 in the "vaporware"  
> category. Hopefully making Wired's list will shame Allan into  
> finally releasing it before next year's list is published!

heh… yesterday I proudly told my brother in law that I am now so  
mainstream that TM has made it to Wired’s vaporware list, though he  
didn’t know what vaporware was ;)