Not to throw oil on the fire here, but Apple has done similar stuff. “To be Sherlocked” literally means having your app be copied by Apple and given away freely with macOS so that your product no longer has a reason to exist.
Backstory: Watson was a popular third party extension to macOS when it was just released. It was a locally running search engine for the web and on your local machine (before the advent of Spotlight Search).
Apple recognised the popularity of the app and released a competitor to Watson. They, however, not only copied Watson’s functionality, but also the look and feel of the app. And for good measure named it “Sherlock” as an obvious jab at the “Watson” name.
They did all this without warning or approval of the makers of Watson. As Sherlock came for free with macOS starting with macOS X 10.2, Watson was obsolete and it was gone soon after.
This has never been stated that this will happen. I do not think this will be the case, although I may be wrong. Isaiah has morals and will not do unto other that has been done to him. Also, the RW theme API is not good. It’s nowhere close to as powerful and easy to use as the Stacks API. Why do you think I have never made a theme before.
Nice find. There was a side project. However, it was not a competitor to RapidWeaver. It’s safe to say that side project has ceased and Stacks Pro is now the only project.
Hi Joe
If the Theme engine of RW isn’t somehow duplicated in StacksPro, how will the transition function for existing projects? Even all the frameworks are using themes as their basis (Foundation 1 & 6, Foundry 1-3, Source, Platform) and even your E-Mail and Portal stacks.
Yes. It was a standalone app. To my knowledge, it was an app for Isaiah alone to test Stacks in it’s own app environment. Developing a plugin for an app can be more difficult to debug things when the plugin is running inside of another app. Having the Stacks plugin running as it’s own app made for easier debugging since the Stacks code could be isolated. It also allows Isaiah to test new frameworks and features that Apple has shipped that maybe RW has not yet implemented.
Let me preface this with the fact that I do not have Stacks Pro and what I am about to say is an educated assumption from me. Things may change…
For all of the Stacks based frameworks, the developers will simply create a Stacks Pro version of their theme. When you migrate your project to Stacks Pro, you will simply select the proper theme. I will have ported my themes to Stacks Pro well before launch.
I do have plans to start developing more traditional based themes for Stacks Pro as well.
There was a post on the next-to-last RapidWeaver Forum where a Stacks user couldn’t get their text to show up correctly in the text stack that shipped with Stacks so it wasn’t a 3rd party stack (as I recall), and the text wouldn’t render correctly so @Isaiah was trying to resolve it, but what @Isaiah couldn’t figure out was the how and the why, and then some guy named Tom from RMS, and I want to say Tom Bradley (because his profile picture somewhat resembled Quarterback Tom Brady), and Tom gave this curt response that RMS had changed the RW Plug-In API, but RMS hadn’t notified any Plug-In developers (notably @Isaiah, as he was about the only Plug-In developer still around after having bought LogHound’s Plug-Ins).
Tom just made this smart ass, curt declaration that kind of had a FY tone to it to @Isaiah.
I think that was when the wheels were coming off at RMS, just complete and total disrespect to @Isaiah. Zero Plug-Ins work anymore except Stacks, and now they’re stealing it.
(I’m going to reference the Bible here since the creator of Stacks (@Isaiah) is named for an Old Testament book which predicts the crucifixion of Jesus 800 years before it occurred. See Isaiah 53. And when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in the 1950s, the first book found was the Book of Isaiah – so Isaiah is important.)
“Thou shalt not steal,” says our Creator at Exodus 20:15, and if you look at the rest of the 10 Commandments they are primarily about not taking things that belong to someone else. Don’t take my name. Do not take another man’s wife. Do not take away the Sabbath day. Do not take another person’s life. Do not take away the truth.
Absolutely. That thread is just a succession of blind statements of false expectiation.
All we do know is that after 16 months of development there is very very little to show with no details, prices, advantages or how much extra the very few stacks developers that have stated they will convert their stacks to Elements, will charge for those Elements.
My anecdote wasn’t intended to validate or invalidate actions of others, just to comment on the comparison with the Windows <> macOS situation in the 80s and 90s.
May be but buzz it still is and has several hundred comments showing positive interest. A lot from users who see new shiny things and have no interest in RW v Stacks, or not impacted by/unaware of a lack of stacks compatibility.
One little designer has stated free element version of purchased stacks and for some reason I think elixir graphics will be similar.
I can but imagine the pressure Isaiah is under and I hope Stackspro makes a public appearance soon but also feel time is ticking away and Elements may gain mindshare and Stackspro will lose momentum.
I don’t wish for RM to go out of business. However I am not in favor of them building their business on the backs of reverse engineering. Hopefully Isaiah is not doing the same. I believe there is enough loyalty with Stacks that developers would be willing to recompile for a slightly different ecosystem without infringing on RM property. At least that’s how I hope it goes down.
You most probably won’t find a one pager where this is stated.
You need to check with each and every developer directly. I guess as soon as the two apps are available, you’ll find this information on the respective home page of the developer.
How much ‘reverse engineering’ is required, though? A stack consists of a plist (which was a format developed by NeXT and absorbed by Apple when they took NeXTSTEP and turned it into MacOSX) which is used to construct the HUD interface, some templates (usually HTML, CSS and JS files, with variables replaced by placeholders), and any libraries and assets that are required. I don’t know if Stacks’ template language is proprietary, but it’s not that dissimilar from the templating language used by Ruby. The proprietary part of Stacks is the engine it uses to process templates, but I see no reason why RM would need to reverse engineer Stacks to replicate this — they should be able to write their own routines to do this (this is not putting someone on the moon).
Because of the nature of a stack, made up of components that follow public domain standards, no ‘evil genius’ conversion is needed to turn it into an element. Stack developers clearly have intellectual property rights in their products (although has anyone actually tested the copyright of HTML, CSS and even JS routines in the courts? That would seem like a fairly flimsy case). Stacks provides encryption for the core part of the plist, which prevents automatic conversion of encrypted stacks, but it’s really not difficult for someone with sufficient time and patience to reconstruct this from what is in the template files — and how the HUD looks.
An element is going to have to be pretty similar to a stack (I’m assuming blocs are not that dissimilar, either). They’re all going to have to have the same elements, and use a templating language to replace variables according to user input through the interface.