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Date: Sun, 1 Oct 95 04:58 MDT
From: ctm@ardi.com (Clifford Thomas Matthews)
To: executor@nacm.com
Subject: status report + a fine example of praise for ARDI
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Hi Folks,
2.0 is rapidly approaching. I think 1.99p is by far our best
experimental release to date. There only a few places where 1.99p
does worse than 1.99o and many new features and many more programs
working now. A week from now Cotton will be back in Albuquerque and
he, Mat and I will try to get as many apps to run as possible during
the following two and a half weeks. Melissa will shelter us from day
to day business issues *and* will be simultaneously improving our WWW
pages and writing the manual that will go with 2.0. In short, we're
hitting the homestretch.
The major pieces of new code that we hope to have finished in this
coming week are:
mat NEXTSTEP/Motorola support
mat Gestalt call to allow programs to detect Executor
mat Cut and Paste between Executor and X-Windows
cotton Better error messages when Executor dies
cotton 32-bit cleanliness warnings working again
ctm Remaining System 7 filesystem call (FSpExchangeFiles)
ctm System 7 CustemGetFile, CustomPutFile
ctm System 7 Dialog routines
ctm Browser improvements
This is a tall order, but even if just the first item for each person
gets done, we'll be pretty happy.
When 2.0 ships it will run many Mac programs, and be able to read and
write many forms of Mac media, but it still won't run everything, or
even nearly as much as the Mac emulators that use Apple's code. This
is going to be a tricky issue from a Public Relations perspective.
Many people will not understand why Executor will have its
limitations, and the failure of a particular program under Executor
may suggest to some that Executor is poorly engineered, or a hack.
ARDI will continue to be up front about Executor's limitations, and we
hope that people will come to our defense in a non-combative way.
I was pleasantly surprised to read the Usenet post reproduced below
(with permission). It is a very good example of a non-hyped
explanation of how Executor may be useful to some people and as such
casts a very good light on ARDI and Executor. If you think you may
want to "plug" Executor sometime in the future, save Rick's letter and
reread it before you write yours.
Executor 2.0 won't solve every PC owner's Mac compatibility problems,
but if even one hundredth of the people who could benefit from
Executor 2.0 hear good things about it, try it out and buy it, we'll
have enough revenue to hire enough new engineers to come out with an
*incredible* 3.0.
Thanks.
--Cliff
ctm@ardi.com
Here's Rick's Letter:
> What exactly is the market for this thing, anyway? The point of
>buying a Mac is much more than the software available--it's the great
>interface and some of the fastest hardware available. I suppose you
>could make a case for PC users 'stuck' in an all-Mac environment that
>need only the barest minimum of compatability/capability, but if that's
>the case you seem to have a very small market.
I would be an example of the target market. I have a great deal of
accumulated Mac software, some of it old favourites, and have a fairly
fast Linux box. As such, I'm thrilled that someone has written such
a product, especially one whose utility I can judge very well with
the provided 10-minute-at-a-time full-function demo version. That's
savvy marketing from a company that respects its customers' ability
to assess value -- which brings me to the other point:
> I'm also quite skeptical of the speed you give ("twice as fast as a
>25Mhz 040") since *Apple's* emulator doesn't come close to that on
>equivalent hardware (to the 90 Mhz Pentium).
I tend to believe these guys, because friends who've used their earlier
version of Executor on NeXTStep tell me they're straight-shooters who
deliver a good product, stand behind it, but are honest about its
limitations. However, you'll note that nobody _has to take their word_
for it. With the demo version avaiable, anyone with sufficient interest
can find out for himself, on his own hardware. I plan to do so, myself,
