Let’s do that for a second.
If you have been creating websites with Stacks for how ever long, and you like that creation process, why would you need Rapidweaver.
For the last how ever many years Rapidweaver has been a means to publish your Stacks pages, that’s it.
There is only one unknown in this debacle. What will Rapidweaver turn out to be on release. You already know the minimum that Stacks 5 will be.
May be the term “developer” was not exactly what I meant, “creators” would have been better.
If you want to use RapidWeaver or Stacks 5 not only for your own small business, you will have to persuade either a company management or your customer that you are using a platform they can trust and brings advantages over Wordpress which they think they know.
Customers know nothing about advantages of one solution over the other. They tend tor trust in “standards” – or how do you explain the success of Microsoft Office.
@Prodrive, Don’t get caught up in the terminology. RW and Stacks has always produced “standard” code. Html-CSS On the internet that is what is required. It doesn’t matter what App made it. It matters what quality of code it outputs and if the webmaster met the criteria/features the client wanted. This is like buying a car. What brand (manufacturer) are you going to buy? It has 4 wheels, doors and a steering wheel.
In regards to trying to work things out. I feel your pain. None of us like disagreement. However we must understand, Dan’s behavior has been consistent for years. Unless some mediator has the power to change the type of person he is at the character level, Dan and Isaiah would not make good business partners. Their philosophies on how to code, handle clients and interact with people are basically 180 degrees apart.
Stacks5 is moving along nicely. It’s going to ship much sooner than you think. This is not years off. Isaiah is a coding maniac. This is a guy who has released multiple updates in one week. Often finds and patches bugs in hours. And has played a significant role in fixing/debugging RW for Dan. Just so the end user has a stable product.
“hack” ?
What does Prodrive mean?
News to me. I’ve never had a customer ever mention WP or any other platform, I do my pitch and show them my own personal company websites and they nod, I tell them my rates and they either say yes or no.
If heard this question already several times. The bigger companies are the more they are looking for standards.
What question?
The question on which basis the website is done.
Let’s be honest here. The ‘big’ companies have and always will employ ‘big companies’. The CEO and boards of investment groups, supermarkets chains, government agencies and the like will offer the jobs to their alma mater or friends of friends that employ dozens of people. RW has and always will be a niche product used mainly by small companies or those using their spare room as an office. That limits your scope to charities, local hospitality companies such as restaurants and bars, schools, health care professionals etc etc. Basically small to medium sized companies. All of which i’ve built sites for. Again, never had the WP question or anything like it.
Show them your work and use that to impress them. Job done.
@Prodrive While your reply is somewhat off topic here, I am really glad you brought this up.
If a potential client ever starts requesting a Wordpress solution, you are already walking into a trap and being setup to fail, if you don’t use Wordpress. I have been there many times. You would be wise to prepare a bombproof response that either kills the WP solution dead in the water, or offer a Stacks solution that provides a demonstartably better solution.
However, a word of warning here. Describe your proposed solution as a Stacks solution, because it is exactly that. Remember, Stacks is a Pro level solution not to be confused with something like an iWeb app.
Don’t suggest any other App and particularly one that has appeared in bundle deals such as Bundle Hunt or MacAppWare. Proposing a solution using an App that was available in a 1 of 10 selection bundle deal for $25, is a surefire way to kill off any proposal. Or indeed if you could read negative reviews of that App on the App Store. Not only will you loose the business, but you will never hear from that organisation again.
Stacks is above all of this and has been for the last 17 years. Stacks is the solution today.
Hey folks – this seems to have diverged away from Q & A. If you would like to discuss things further or bantar over the details with other folks, can you take those discussions to another thread? Thx
I’m sorry if my responses tend to ramble on a bit. It’s just my style. I’m a software developer, not a marketing expert. I hope you understand 🤓
If I answer a larger question – or with more detail than you asked – I’m sorry, it’s nothing personal. I don’t mean it as an attack or to be provocative.
I’m getting A TON of questions. A few here, but also a ton in email support, and on the YourHead Slack, etc. I’m trying to use this AMA to answer as many of those questions as I can in one shot. That way I can reply with a link, save my fingers some typing, and get back to writing code.
Being a software developer is all about empathy. You have to be able to put yourself in the shoes of many different sorts of users. I think empathy is a skill that can get better with practice. And I practice a lot. I’ve been writing software since I was 10 years old – almost every day for 42 years. (ok, yeah, that means i’m an old geezer 🧙♂️)
But today, a lot of these questions are more directly about… well… me. Which is pretty weird. It’s actually kind of uncomfortable speaking directly from my own perspective. But I kind of think that’s what an AMA is supposed to be. So just this once, I’m going to let you peek into my crazy brain and hope that you’ll walk a mile with me in my shoes.
Tomorrow it’ll be back to the usual empathy thing. :-)
@isaiah Just an idea for stacks app, specifically for beginners. Have a section that basically says “put your Google analytics code here”.
I like the idea of standard social media icons / buttons being a drag and drop option and baked into the app. It’s part and parcel of having a website nowadays so should be part of the app regardless of framework imo.
I don’t use RW preview, maybe because in RW5 or 6 it wasn’t great so i got used to preview in browser. But a mobile simulation or iPad etc would be good. Yes I know we can preview in dev tools but just a thought. Like one part of Joe’s Agent stack that you can switch between mobile and desktop views using a browser.
Missing stacks. Haven’t had one in a while so maybe this has been addressed but when I’ve moved machines previously and missed a few stacks I’m always trying to figure out what the bloody missing stack is. Can you identify the missing stack and tell me what it is? Or was? Not sure you can do this - it’s obvious that it doesn’t know what the stack is but the project should retain some memory of it surely?
Automatic updates of developer stacks feature. Turn on or off.
I currently use Foundation and have created a folder in the side bar for F6 stacks. However sometimes Joe will add a stack or replace a stack with a new version. I can miss this so is there a way to have a specific framework folder that new or upgraded stacks of the frame work just gets added. So I dont have to trawl blogs and see i’ve missed an announcement and then find the new stack in my library to drag to my created F6 folder. So basically frameworks have a folder in the sidebar and anything new just get’s added. Maybe an announcement when you launch that says “F6 just added a new stack - more info here”.
That’s all I can think of for now. Maybe a load of rubbish but it’s an AMA.
@isaiah is Stacks app going to have a slightly different UI to Stacks 4? I can understand similar for continuity but a few changes to make it easier for new users to manipulate stack settings might be a good thing?
Have you been limited by RW in the past as to what the Stacks UI could do?
I understand this as I too have been writing code and working with users for a living for the same period of time and longer if you include the time learning how to. Everything from topographical modelling to billing systems. So I appreciate your perspective on things.
Would it be possible to have margins and fill mode be screen size specific?
For instance, I’d like some content to spread to display width on mobile while centered and at 50% fill size on desktop. Currently I have to jump through hoops to achieve this; making this a standard setting in the Layout section on every stack would be very nice :)
Cheers,
Erwin
This is more of a stacks request than a Stacks request really. This feature is already possible and certainly available since Source was released and acessible to all Source stacks. Tav was doing this 6 years ago.
Adding these features as a standard user setting in every stack would be a backward step back toward the older generation stacks that have a multite of settings. The more settings that exist in every stack then the slower the whole system will be. There are far better and more clever ways of achieveing this.
Hey folks, I’m going to do one more round of answers on this and then close it up. Mostly just so that I can get back to the work of actually building this app.
Perhaps a bit later we can have another similar thing – maybe even live in video sometime? Anyone up for something like that? Maybe at the end of next week?
Pretty reasonable. I think I’d want to make sure and leave room for choice and extensibility since there’s much more varied landscape of analytics tools after GDPR.
Some do, some don’t.
In RW v7.1 Realmac started making threaded requests, without warning or preparation (I know – because I was in a hotel on vacation when Realmac told me it was happening in the v7.1 release THAT DAY)
For quite some time this made preview very very flaky. Making asynchronous backgroundable, reentrant code is hard work and must be done carefully and deliberately. Simply making threaded calls was a huge mistake that RapidWeaver is still paying for today in terms of stability.
Hopefully with a more thoughtful deliberate architecture this will be less of a problem for both Stacks and the other guys too. Using all the cores in your machine is a great idea – but doing it with no planning is… not. 😝
This was a bug addressed in Stacks v4.2.3.
OK. I think I’ll call it there in terms of bug reports. I think this AMA is really trying to fill in the information vacuum around the RW9 announcements and trying allay fears and smooth over some anxieties with some real, no spin info.
If you have other bug reports or specific feature requests, I always love to get both. You can either send them to our support email: http://yourhead.com/support
or you can add them directly in the Stacks public bug&feature-tracker: http://yourhead.com/bug
Yes and No.
My priorities are in this order: schedule, stability, and a smooth transition.
In order to achieve the top priority of getting something out and in your hands as soon as possible, it means making as few changes as possible, and keepin the app to the most essential features.
My goal is to be able to cover 80% of the projects of 80% of the users.
So the first version will be all about keeping things the same. The Stacks core will be 99% the same. Where I might make a few tweaks in the UI is to make the Stacks library a more integral part of the app overall.
Outside of the Stacks core, the app will be quite different – but hopefully similar enough and recognizable enough, that I can meet that “smooth transition” goal.
But I want to make sure I set expectations correctly: the first versions will be stable and functional, but there will be no new features beyond what’s absolutely necessary.
New features take months to build and months to tests – I’d much rather have something in your hands – even if very limited – than nothing in your hands. There will be a lot of skeptics – native Mac apps aren’t often built in 6 months by a single engineer – they usually take several engineer-years.
That said, once this version is out an in your hands, I don’t intend to let up, we’ll try to follow as quickly as possible to fill in the gaps and begin adding new features.
Have you been limited by RW in the past as to what the Stacks UI could do?
Oh man. I don’t think this forum can really convey the magnitude here…
By in large the Realmac devs and I worked well together over the many years to bring new features for both the app and all the plug-ins – especially Stacks.
So for times like the big 32-64 bit architecture shift we had to work closely so that 32/64 bit versions could be bundled together in a way to keep the automatic updater simple and straightforward.
This made the transition largely transparent to users – and little more than a couple dialog boxes, even though it was a huge change underneath. This kind of stuff required us to work very closely together to solve the problems as a single team.
But around 2016 or 2017 or so… around the time of the RW 7.1 I guess – things really broke down. It felt to me like Realmac was making impossible demands, changing APIs without warning or deprecation, and became completely deaf to all my requests.
The practical takeaway is that it was almost impossible to get access to things like the resources window, the file-list, or other app-level features.
I’m really really looking forward to Stacks BECOMING the app – not just being INSIDE the app.
This will give things like Foundation and Foundry first-class position to not just add/configure UI inside of Stacks – but allow for the configuration of the UI of the ENTIRE APP.
I’m not at all sure what that means today – I just know that there is SO MUCH that we want to do – and now we can finally begin.
Thanks for replying, I feel a bit guilty for asking and distracting you from working on Stacks app lol.
Really looking forward to seeing it in action, can’t wait!
Where is the feature suggestion/request link? Thanks.