And… Nah.
No matter how much I wantto find out about Stacks Pro, I’m absolutely not signing up to some third party social platform that will do god knows what with my data.
Forcing your customer base to do that just to get product news is a terrible idea.
I’ve seen very little from Realmac regarding the development of Elements. Maybe they are using a social platform that I don’t use?
There are developer beta versions available (only for friendly developers, nah, not me 😉)
They have been on Twitter mentioning the Elements builds for Devs to test recently.
I hope Stacks Pro is going to enable editing in Preview (it’s not as if I haven’t asked 😆). If it’s just going to be a standalone version of what is possible now in RW8/RW9, it’s not going to take us that much forward. But being able to use the Stacks libraries we’ve already invested in, in the kind of way that Dan is showing here, would be a big competitive advantage of Stacks Pro over RW Elements (where, presumably, we’ll have to buy them all over again as ‘elements’ from participating developers).
At 2 mins into the video, there is a tender moment where Dan anounced that all the Foundry Stacks have been converted into Elements and he hopes Adam doesn’t mind. He mentions that users will not be able to do this and only developers will be able to do this. I expect this will save Adam some effort and there won’t be any need to complicate things by requiring Stacks.
Thank goodness all stacks developers who care about this have put in place measures to stop RM or anyone from converting their stacks and eliminating the need for Stacks.
Not many devs are joining RM in this Elements escapade. Some are but many are not.
It’s unbelievable that Dan has just stripped Isaiah out of the equation and thought it would be okay. Disgustingly sleazy.
If I remember correctly, an original “feature” of Elements is that it would convert (using a transpiler?) customers existing stacks in to compatible elements, unless they had been encrypted by the developer to prevent this. There was a raft of stacks updates to include encryption for a while from various devs to prevent this conversion.
I can only guess that the strategy would be to provide this as a “quick fix” to get users/devs easily onboard to RW Elements with their existing stacks/tools but without the need for the Stacks plugin. Once in this new ecosystem the up sell to use new element versions with new elements specific features (whatever they may be) would be the driver for new business for devs, for Realmac it would be the dependence on Stacks purchase removed.
Interesting to see that the footer on the Realmac site no longer mentions it is built on RW + Stacks + Foundry.
Correct. Although that was now so long ago (+15 months), in this new age of ChatGTP AI, the process may well just require a few carefully crafted questions to ChatGPT to “transpile” the few available unencrypted stacks. It is likely that any developers hoping to capitalise on reselling the Elements versions of their stacks (same price as the Stacks versions + an inevitable premium for the support) will be in for big surprise.
In the past, RW+Stacks power has however, continued to exist due to the huge resource of clever and diverse stacks, the support of those stacks developers and importantly due to the Stacks support from YourHead. Yet as the movers and shakers in the Stacks community have already encrypted their stacks to prohibit this Elementisation, that huge resource does not exist in a an easy to plunder way.
I see the use of transpiled stacks, whether done by RM (without the authority of the developer), misguided developers, or by ChatGPT back room conversions, will create an allmighty and unsustainable support sink hole.
So where’s that Stacks Pro update?
First, I doubt end users will be able to convert unencrypted stacks to elements. I guess this “feature” will only be available for developers (who have no moral and want to go that route). But you never know.
Second, I doubt ChatGTP will be able to convert stacks to elements. But you never know 😝
Which is still available through RW8/RWC and Stack Plugin.
Question is, if a user will have to pay an additional license for RW Elements…
Hopefully
Worthless to me too.
I understand why Dan decided to go the Elements route — he handed over a lot of control over RW to Stacks, and ended up with something that was basically just a publishing platform for Stacks. The way he went about it, though… well, we’ve been through all that. The question now is what Elements brings to the table that Stacks Pro doesn’t. Clearly those of us who have invested in large collections of stacks aren’t going to rush down the Elements route, especially if we have to wait for developers to port their stacks over, and then have to buy them all over again. But for new users it is a different matter, and Stacks has never been particularly intuitive or user friendly for newcomers. There is plenty of scope for improvement.
Editing in Preview is one obvious example — in Stacks 4 it used to be easier to do this because you could navigate from stack to stack with the arrow keys, but Stacks 5 removed this, and any hope that the new Stacks menu and keyboard commands would work in Preview has proved to be in vain. In Dan’s demonstration the current stack is highlighted in Preview, and this is a no-brainer enhancement too. His demo also showed an ‘inspector’ panel which seems a step-up from the Stacks HUD, where there is also plenty of scope for improvement. If it were possible to run Elements and Stacks (pretty much as is now), at least for the foreseeable future, this would also make it easier for RW/Stacks users to transition to RW/Elements.
The point is, Dan has to do something with RW to keep it viable, and we can’t go on demonising him forever. This is commerce, and business owners have bills to pay. What happened last year was a fiasco, but we’ve moved on since, and while RW9 may not have been the most graceful climbdown, it provided continuity for RW/Stacks.
Based on what I’ve seen in the demo video of RW Elements… it’s subpar compared to Blocs. New users don’t know/care about the history with Stacks. Blocs is more mature when it comes to visual/intuitive editing. That’s what Elements will have to compete with.
