Re: 34S suggestions (a bit long) Message #29 Posted by Walter B on 30 Sept 2011, 4:56 p.m., in response to message #28 by Egan Ford
Egan,
Quote:
I've had nothing but problems with collaborative Word projects. XML vs compat mode docs, markup, and merge do not work as cleanly as one would like. I've lost so much time due to Word bugs that I now hand merge in changes.
What you describe is exactly what I experienced also for many years in my professional life. Documents and structures, carefully assembled by few, then corrupted by (usually some more) people of good will but no clue - having fun, as Brian wrote. I'm not very keen on mending such a mess again.
Way back in April, there was a prominent member of this forum asking for my manual data file. He claimed he was planning some nice extensions of it. I offered him he may write whatever he thinks being appropriate straight ahead, send it to me, we'd discuss it and I'd insert it in the manual at a location we agree on, in a decently formatted way. No, that wasn't the way he wanted. He kept asking for data, and I eventually sent him my entire WORD file. Apparently then he or his mailbox wasn't prepared for it - I found out several weeks later by asking myself - I sent it again - then he complained these were old data etc. etc. Making a long story short, I never got back a single byte from there so far.
Despite this very frustrating experience, I am willing to offer such a collaboration once more. But please, don't you cry you want to have all and want it now. One basis of our WP 34S project turning out successfully is both of us, Pauli and me, have a common vision, we committed and delivered, each of us in his area of expertise, and we discussed the open points until we both could agree. We needed some time sometimes, and we also had some hard discussions, but I never felt our business lost balance, it was always a give and take. We then integrated two more people, and each of them brought his area of expertise which wasn't covered sufficiently in our team before.
The manual was published quite early, together with the invitation for constructive critics, as you find in the archives. And IIRC, we've listened to almost every reasonable proposal and remark and took them into account. So it went pretty well, though the amount of active "beta reader" turned out being a bit less than I expected.
After all, now we've got a product, and I get the feeling all kind of folks are trying to hopp on the bandwagon now. Come on, contribute something useful yourself if you want to join late. All the tools and information are readily available. But don't claim you *will* do something, provided you get 100 pages for free first.
Personally, I'm not ready yet to sacrifice our work achieved so far to the cro..., hmmmh, community. I see this opinion is not popular, maybe out of time, but that's the way I think it's right - and that's how we reached this result. If you can't stand that, feel free to start your own project. I wish you good luck, may offer some support if you like and am looking forward to *your* results.
Ok, so now I will be grilled for that :-(
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