Software status
Tony G
hands right now. I thought I'd toss out a note about my
experience so far.
Bro Cope had mvToolbox in active development some years ago and
did a major push to bring it to a wider audience. He spent a lot
of money on sales and marketing which produced incommensurately
small returns, and he had to pull back. Since then he has been
doing what the rest of us do, sharpening his own personal toolkit
without a lot of focus on what happens when other people install
it - because not a lot of other people were installing it.
But that's all changed. Some of us have been encouraging people
to give mvToolbox a shot, because the software deserves it, and
because Bro deserves it. OK, that half of the initiative has
been started but the software still has some rough edges from
being in relative isolation for a few years.
So far I've found the install process has needed some work for
D3. Bro has been aggressively and enthusiastically resolving
every issue, and asking for more feedback. The software itself
is well refined and seems to have few bugs or anomalies. I think
everything I've pointed out recently has been something that Bro
added or tweaked in recent years, during that period when he
didn't have to worry about someone else like me/us poking at his
software. The process we follow is quite simple - I point out
issues to him, he fixes them, he gets me a new release or some
fixed files, and we move forward.
The only major issue I have, if one can call it that, is the
whole initial "getting to know you" or "it's installed, now what"
thing. I commented on this in another thread here and stated
there what my approach is on that topic. Comments on welcome.
On the docs in general, if you need to find help on something
after you've started using the software, don't worry, its in
there.
Overall, what I'm saying is that this software is everything it's
advertised to be, and the few occasional issues aren't show
stoppers. If you find anything at all in this software that
seems "off", send Bro a note and see what he says. Maybe he just
forgot to enable some option you want, or it was accidentally
removed from a menu or something, or maybe he just didn't provide
enough doc info on something that's in there but difficult to
find.
It looks like this software just needs an occasional tweak, and
we'll all benefit from the tweaks that others recommend. We're
used to this process with every product we use. Because this
software can change the way we work with our code dramatically, I
personally feel that it's worth the email exchanges, and I
encourage you to enter into this active maintenance process with
Bro as your time permits.
Thanks for your time.
T