Subject:
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Re: Announcing Bricksmith for Macintosh
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.cad.dev.mac
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Date:
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Thu, 25 Aug 2005 07:22:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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3943 times
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Yeah, you aren’t suppose to distribute the library with your app.
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Well that just sucks. They don’t want too many people using LDraw, I guess?
Because many users simply won’t jump through that many hoops to get started.
They’ll download a CAD program, double-click it, see scary messages about
LDraw not being found, and (in many cases) give up at that point and go do
something more fun. This is especially true on the Mac, where many users
just want to use the dang thing rather than spend all day fiddling with it.
;)
So I hope Allen can convince them to let him continue distributing his app
both with and without LDraw contained. I don’t see how this hurts anyone,
and it makes it accessible to people who just wouldn’t succeed with it
otherwise.
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The cool shniz would be to have the app auto find the library or download it
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for you if it can’t find it though!
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Well yes, that would be cool, though not as cool as having it just unpack and
be ready to run. And it’s a lot more work for the developer.
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Yes, but it is the best way. When the library isn’t found, just display a
window asking “1). browser for library”
“2). search for library”
“3). download library and install (New uses select this)”
That should keep the low-attention-span Mac OS X users a few more seconds.
(LOL, I’m one of them too) Anyway, the url at ldraw.org is always the same, and
it isn’t actually that hard to download it. I have some Cocoa code somewhere
that does url downloads and it is only 1 or 2 lines. Unpacking is probably only
a few lines (unless it is an NSTask, but still it isn’t that hard).
There are a few reasons for not distributing the LDraw library.
1). Legal reasons. I don’t remember what they are, I just know that James
Jessiman’s family owns the rights to the core of the library and they have made
their decision. Since the formalization of the LDraw Steering Committee, the
licensing might have changed. I’m not sure.
2). Updates. People were distributing the library with their app and it quickly
got out of date. Really out of date. And it was hard to get them to update
their downloads. And it was a mess. For me. ;) In fact, I don’t think anyone
really updated their downloads. Oh well.
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Announcing Bricksmith for Macintosh
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| (...) Well, I suppose that as long as we're stuck with lawyers in our society, we have to face realities like this. We don't have to like it, though. (...) Making LDRAW-using apps harder to use doesn't really help this, though. People who stick with (...) (19 years ago, 25-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Announcing Bricksmith for Macintosh
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| (...) Well that just sucks. They don't want too many people using LDraw, I guess? Because many users simply won't jump through that many hoops to get started. They'll download a CAD program, double-click it, see scary messages about LDraw not being (...) (19 years ago, 24-Aug-05, to lugnet.cad.dev.mac, FTX)
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