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 Posted 6/11/2007 11:07:27 AM |
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NewsGator
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| We've been a bit quiet about TopStyle's future recently (understatement?), so I'm going to try to clear it up now. First - when we bought Bradbury Software, Nick and I both said publicly that TopStyle would live on. And we fully intend for it to do so. So why have things been so quiet? The main reason is that we have been working with a number of potential corporate buyers for TopStyle, folks who could take over the product and continue to innovate and enhance it. While these conversations were happening, I couldn't really say anything helpful publicly, and thus chose to wait. In the end, for various reasons, we have chosen to keep TopStyle within the NewsGator product portfolio, and we are doing several things to this end. First, starting immediately, we will be building an upgrade that will include some bug fixes, including support for Windows Vista. Work on this will start immediately, and I'd expect this release will be ready in the next few weeks. As you know, we've also been looking for a Delphi developer to help work on TopStyle. This search has yielded many candidates, but none who were a good fit for what we are looking for. We're now expanding this search to the entire continental U.S. effective immediately, and we will consider a remote relationship for the right candidate. If you know someone, definitely refer them! Somewhat (but not entirely) dependent on that search, we will be building TopStyle 4.0, with a great new set of features that you, our customers, have been asking for. I know this has taken far too long, and for that I apologize. In retrospect, it would have been better to communicate more openly about as much as we could sooner than now. But you should all know that Nick has been a vocal advocate on your behalf. The prior thread on this topic was getting a little out of hand, and was starting to make personal attacks, and while we haven't moderated that conversation at all, I have asked our support folks to lock the thread from further posts. I'd also like to say thanks to all of the loyal TopStyle customers for hanging in there with us! Further questions and followup are welcome. Greg Reinacker
Founder and CTO
NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
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| Posted 6/11/2007 11:16:25 AM |
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| Holding my breath, but it does indeed sound like good news though I'll hold off the celebrating until I do see the updates and new versions actually downloading to my hd.
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| Posted 6/11/2007 11:48:35 AM |
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Sounds great! I truly appreciate the response.
Few questions...
What kind of involvement will the community have in TopStyle 4... regarding features, improvements etc?
Will there be some sort of voting system (as there was in the past) for a list of features that we can all vote on?
Will the next version of TopStyle support XML/XSS etc?
Personally I know what made TopStyle a hit was the fact that Nick really listened to his users as to what to put into the program, I hope this version is no different.
-Matt
Matt
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| Posted 6/11/2007 12:51:51 PM |
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Joy  , glad to hear some rumblings on updates to TS. Hopefully, like zurdog said, you will allow the TS customers to vote on the features they most want.
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| Posted 6/11/2007 9:44:30 PM |
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I view this announcement with both sadness and some possible joy. Sadness in a way because I will not be buying the next version of TopStyle personally. But primarily because it is written for Windows and I have made the transition to using SuSE Linux and open source at home. I have seen other posts requesting that TopStyle be ported to Linux and Nick's response that there are no plans in that direction. Too bad. For anyone in this position, I recommend Bluefish as the best open source gui text editor. It supports pretty much any programming language you could ask for, including xml, jsp, java, javascript, css, php, and many others.
The one ray of hope I have is that the school district that I work for will purchase a license for version 4. Since I don't have much choice but to use Windows at work, and every program that we use, excepting those that are web-based, requires Windows, I can at least continue to enjoy using TopStyle there. I very much appreciate the features that it offers, and I have promoted it to at least one teacher as an editor of choice. But be aware, as users become more educated to the advantages of open source operating systems and programs, there will continue to be a dwindling market share of Windows. And this is not an idle cry of impending doom, simply read the writing on the wall. As System Administrator I will be doing my part to help the movement along.
I would end on a note of 'thanks for the ride' to Nick. It was great while it lasted.
Regards,
~mark
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| Posted 6/12/2007 1:30:55 AM |
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| Sara is right - stop celebration UNTIL at least the upgrade of teh current version 3.x (vista-compatibility) is on our harddrive .....
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| Posted 6/12/2007 9:57:38 AM |
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Rockstar
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| Thanks for the update, Greg. I'm am sure, though, that you will appreciate that TS users will approach your assurance with a somewhat jaundiced eye ... As with Sara and others, I'll hold the celebrations until the new version of TS is on my hard disk.
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| Posted 6/12/2007 9:59:47 AM |
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| Hi folks, As you can imagine, I'm really glad that we're finally breaking our wall of silence about TopStyle  I really do want to aplogize for the lack of communication about TopStyle - I know I could've handled it better, and I hate that I've lost the trust of some long-time customers. As I've stated before, I continue to rely on TopStyle every day, so I'm personally committed to keeping it alive. I know from the outside it appeared that we've been ignoring TopStyle, so I want to let everyone know that starting this week I'll be working on TopStyle again (yay!). My first priority is to take care of any Vista-related issues, since we've heard from a number of TopStyle customers who have encountered problems after making the switch to Vista. We want to have a new release with Vista support very soon, but I'm going to whittle away at the accumulated buglist before then to make sure that the next build isn't simply a "Vista compatibility upgrade." Thanks,
Nick Bradbury
Nick's Blog
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| Posted 6/12/2007 10:05:00 AM |
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zurdog (6/11/2007)
What kind of involvement will the community have in TopStyle 4... regarding features, improvements etc?I have always developed with the involvement of customers, and that won't change. However, I can't guarantee that I'll use a voting system - I stopped doing that a while ago since it was such as PITA trying to stop people from gaming the results.
Will the next version of TopStyle support XML/XSS etc? Honestly, I doubt it. I think one of the biggest mistakes developers make is adding too much to their applications, so I'm not planning to stray away from the "core" web authoring technologies (that is, CSS and xHTML). But there are plenty of things I could add to TopStyle which make it far better for web authoring - and I'd love to hear from you what you'd like to see. Best,
Nick Bradbury
Nick's Blog
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| Posted 6/12/2007 12:33:15 PM |
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I have always developed with the involvement of customers, and that won't change. However, I can't guarantee that I'll use a voting system - I stopped doing that a while ago since it was such as PITA trying to stop people from gaming the results. So I guess I'm to assume that you'll be working on TopStyle 4? As indicated earlier it seemed like someone else was going to be found for that position. Regardless... I'm happy you're back to TopStyle!!!! I think for this next minor release (aside from Vista support), simply having updated style definitions for all of the browsers. For 4.0, some kind of 'plugin' system so other people can add to the functionality. Anyways.... glad to hear things are moving forward!
Matt
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