In article
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
"Niels Kobschaetzki" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Feb 20, 2008 6:22 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Thanks to everyone for their responses.
> >
> > I guess the bigger question is where is BibDesk going? Is the intent to
> > make it a research tool for IT developers and programmers, or is it
> > intended to become an application widely used by all scholars/researchers
> > instead of that other commercial product?
>
> <snip bibdesk for everyone or only for IT-savvy-ppl? mixing up TOFU
> and bottom-posting is even worth then top-posting all way throughÂhow
> about a FAQ for the list which style is preferred?>
Posting style is probably not profitable to debate here...
> I think that this depends mainly on the community. Bibdesk being
> freeware depends on the community and freeware-developers usually add
> at first all the functionality they need for themself and later that
> what the rest of the world wants.
Unfortunately, this is why a lot of software sucks, IMNSHO. Programs
turn into a hodgepodge of features, held together internally with
spaghetti. Over time, it ends up being as confusing to new users as it
is useful to old users. This isn't limited to open source, either;
commercial software suffers from the same problems.
BibDesk's user base has generally consisted of TeX/BibTeX users, who
tend to be annoyingly detail-oriented. These are the freaks that whine
like this: "but I /have/ to have a citekey with the first three words of
a title that have more than 4 characters, unless it doesn't have a title
in which case I /have/ to use the first 3 letters of the last author's
maiden aunt's middle name."
Accommodating such reqeusts has led to BibDesk having a huge help book
and searchable preferences. It tries to do everything in the most
flexible way possible, which generally leads to confusion. I've
certainly added my share of feature bloat to BibDesk, unfortunately.
The upshot of this is: I don't know where BibDesk is going, and there is
no roadmap, per se. I'd like to see it move away from the pure
BibTeX/TeX focus and be more accessible and useful for non-geeks who
have no clue what a citekey format string is (and couldn't care less).
Seeing as how I've quit development, future direction is now up to
Christiaan to determine.
--
adam
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