Reece Dunn wrote:
2009/4/18 Kai Blin <kai.b...@gmail.com>:
On Saturday 18 April 2009 05:21:20 Dan Kegel wrote:
The one that worked out best was to pick some random
user who's almost happy, fix the last few bugs that
are keeping his apps from working, and then once
he's happy, move on to the next such user.
The problem seems to be identifying these people. The model assumes that you
can tell which piece of software almost works, and that you know the almost
happy users. In reality, you only seem to hear from the pretty unhappy users
and the occasional really happy user. Susan Cragin is about the only user I
can think of off the top of my head who's almost happy and could be made
completely happy by fixing all of the remaining bugs in DNS.
You could also pick some games as well. A lot of the Oberon Media
casual games work (probably around 50-60%), but there are bugs in the
launch page that means you don't get a seamless experience. The Game
Socks versions of the games have a seamless experience with the splash
loader (not sure about purchasing games there, though).
Other popular games and games platforms like WoW and Steam will also
help your gamer users.
The one trouble with gamer users is that they tend to have a lot of
games that they want working. Probably the major exception is WoW --
and it's a very wise choice for us to make sure it works really well,
since many users want that and only that.
CodeWeavers are doing this to some extent - now branching out to fix
other applications. There was a big push a while back to get Photoshop
usable.
AppDB or something similar is useful for determining the most popular
applications that people are using. This does not cover the users,
though -- a user may be happy with one app, but unhappy with another
because that one is obscure/unpopular (think in-house applications).
Also, reality has us deal with the fact that new applications are added while
we're working on the old ones, and looking at the graphs, we're only going to
make a significant number of users happy when we're about 98% done fixing the
bugs. I realize that it's a bit hard to model "rate of new applications with
new bugs being added", but that's what happens in real life.
Not just new applications, but upgrades as well. iTunes is a
constantly shifting landmark, from what I understand. IE6, 7 and 8 use
more of the Windows API. Photoshop only works with earlier versions.
There have been updates to fix Office 2007 SP1 issues.
Some of the major pain points I can see in the future for getting Wine
to run applications are:
1. applications that use the newer Windows Vista and 7 APIs -- this
is ok if the application is also designed to run on XP or earlier, but
applications will start targetting XP and later or Vista and later.
2. applications that use .NET, WinForms and/or WPF -- these should
be ok on Wine if the Microsoft and/or Mono runtimes can support these.
3. applications that start using more (unimplemented or partially
implemented) of the XP and earlier APIs.
So a happy user today could be an unhappy user tomorrow if they try
and upgrade one of their applications. But such is the nature of
playing continual catchup.
Perhaps this implies we shouldn't try so hard to get the apps that are
about to break on upgrade, even if they are big ones. We've spent a lot
of effort chasing Photoshop, but if only the Photoshop of three years
ago works then we haven't really gained much directly.
Thanks,
Scott Ritchie
