Re: TimeTo (was Re: My current set)

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 3940

Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-26 14:42:53

TimeTo started life as Above & Beyond and I have had a copy for around 10 years.

The algorithm that runs the “dynamic scheduling” of A&B was developed by Greg Thorne while at University. He then went on to develop and sell A&B. A new version of which came out every couple of years. However, you never really felt he had his heart in devloping it and at some time(I can’t remember when) he made A&B a free download.

David Berman, who was a user and enthusiastic beta tester for A&B then came to some arrangement with Greg to continue developing A&B, but with it called TimeTo.

Greg then appeared to change his mind about A&B, the free download was no longer available and he started to develop it again with the last new release in may 2004, but with only minor enhancements/bug fixes, the last notable release was 2000, with the previous release in 1998 and there was a beta kicking around for a while between 2000 and 2003, when the 2004 version was released.

Between releases he goes silent, and I can’t remember any interim releases to fix bugs. Rumour has it that he does plan to continue developing it, but whatever the agreement is between A&B and TimeTo, the fact that Greg may continue with A&B doesn’t seem to be a threat to TimeTo.

TimeTo 1.0 is thefore probably based on A&B version 6 (I think we got to version 4 before Greg switched to numbering versions by year).

However, A&B, in spite of its core strengths was a bit of a mess. It was inconsistent, menu structures were a bit strange, and there were some bugs in the “dynamic scheduling” engine, as well as many minor annoyances.

What David Berman has done, is to dramatically tidy up the program, bugs have been fixed, additional views have been added, dialog boxes are more consistent etc etc, but it is still fundamentally a bug fixed and tidied up version of A&B, so I suspect this is why it is still at version 1.

Since my first email with David in July, I see that I have had 62 emails from him in response to sggestions for changes and enhancements (plus some bugs)and I have installed 5 or 6 new betas as he has taken my comments on board. You can see from the web site that there has been a lot of activity.

None of these have been major changes, but I think he is right to concentrate on getting rid of the A&B legacy to produce a bug free more logically organised TimeTo, before he makes any major additions.

Having said that, he does have someone looking at syncing with Outlook, and I have had the occasional email from him, some weeks after my original, asking me to exapand on some of the suggestions I have made. So all told it all looks promising.

But none of my cons have yet been dealt with, But to be fair I only started using it late July.

Graham

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