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.
Iām really sorry guys, you may not like what RM are doing, but the interest is genuine for many people. The videos shared on the forum do show progression of the app. RM are good app developers.
In the end many users who are not on this forum who have used the app for years will follow the natural progression. The only thing to mitigate that would be the appearance of Stacks Pro and those people dependent on third party Stacks that are not moving to Elements.
Still does not make it right.
My anecdote wasnāt intended to validate or invalidate actions of others, just to comment on the comparison with the Windows <> macOS situation in the 80s and 90s.
I remember that exchange and thought the same.
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 donāt 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 thatās how I hope it goes down.
At a slight tangent, how will people know which app a Stacks developer will support? It would help to know in making decisions about the future, especially before Elements is released. If, for example, all the stacks I use are not porting to Elements or are not going to be further developed for Stacks, that would help in making decisions. There are cost implications here.
You most probably wonāt 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, youāll find this information on the respective home page of the developer.
Definitely there will be a fragmentation.
Iāve made my decision a while ago.
High fives
I still canāt figure out all of Foundation 6, but high fives. Iāll figure it out.
Wow.
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How much āreverse engineeringā 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 donāt know if Stacksā template language is proprietary, but itās 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 ā 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 āevil geniusā 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 itās really not difficult for someone with sufficient time and patience to reconstruct this from what is in the template files ā and how the HUD looks.
An element is going to have to be pretty similar to a stack (Iām assuming blocs are not that dissimilar, either). Theyāre all going to have to have the same elements, and use a templating language to replace variables according to user input through the interface.
Perhaps what you say is true. Probably is. That said it is still dirty pool.
Heck I was the one who suggested way back, at least 5 years ago, probably more, that RM should adopt its own CSS library. They needed to modernize. But I expected the worst case scenario was RM and Stacks would compete.
Actually the make up of Blocsās Bric is more sophisticated (uses JS) and Blocs has its own Bric creation tools with UI designer, and āBric compileā all done from inside Blocs. We are digressing a bit here, but Blocs being a one stop shop, never had the lack of co-operation, lack of crash report sharing, lack of development, blame shifting of RW issues onto Stacks and secret changing of the RW UI that Stacks was faced with.
One of the best things about StacksPro is that Stacks will be free of all this nonsense and in total control so that going forward Stacks potential can be unleashed. Ironically, the small proportion of the 5000+ stacks that may be converted to Elements, will all be held back by these historical issues. I predict that StacksPro new stack development and existing stack upgrades will explode once all the RW shackles are released.
Iām looking forward to RM announcing the list of what Stacks features and what Addons will be abandoned.
For example, will Partials, Externals and Templates be fully supported? How will the stacks update sytsem work and will stacks updates need further conversion to Elements? Will the other addons that many RW Project files depend on even work, remebering that the RW UI has changed, apparently? The story from RM has been that existing RW Stacks Projects will work, but that will depend on a great many things.
The elephant in the Elements room will be who is going to debug Elements that donāt work. Isaiah is an absolute bloodhound of a debugging ninja who really knows his craft and only he has years of Stacks knowledge. Do RM have the skills to debug existing RW stacks projects? That remains to be seen.
Sure, but there are lots of questions about Stacks Pro that remain to be answered. How will it support existing RW documents? How reliable will its FTP client be? Will it require stacks to be recompiled to work with it? Will it actually make it to the line? And thatās just to get back to where we are now. Looking ahead, can we really depend on YourHead to maintain the platform we use for developing sites? And what new features will Stacks Pro offer? Will there be WYSIWYG preview editing, as there is in Blocs and Elements? (Bearing in mind that Stacks 5 took away the ability to tab from stack to stack in Preview).
Isaiah may be an absolute bloodhound of a debugging ninja, but he still hasnāt addressed the bloat issue that fills RW files with tens of megabytes of other peopleās junk images. And when it comes to these kinds of support issues, he seems to be very stubborn and opinionated. (There has also been a fair amount of blameshifting going on ā for instance, he had a go at me for deleting this crud, yet he doesnāt seem to want to own the fact that it is his product that is generating it. Itās easy to turn it back on users, but turning a 3mb document into a 45mb document is not commercially acceptable).
So Iām not as confident and enthusiastic as you about Stacks Pro. At best, I sense it will do what we can do already, but without RW, and weāll then have to see whether it offers significant improvements in the future. I am more confident in Elements actually happening. And whilst weāve all been dumping on Dan this last year and a bit, itās still his product that weāre using. Over the years, itās been a good product, too. As Iāve said before, if one has invested in a big stacks library, and in mastering the (sometimes quite steep) RW/Stacks learning curve to get things to actually work, what we have now is powerful and effective. I suspect Iāll be using it for a few years to come, especially since ā like most people today ā Iām trying hard to avoid spending more money on computer related stuff. Because itās just not there any more.
It can only be better that the RW one.
Sure not.
You, or we, will see when itās available.
Which is a RW resources bug.
You see, everything will be better when Stacks is a standalone product.
I donāt particularly want ftp. Transmit is what I use. Why complicate an app with ftp? My host only allows ssh now as ftp is getting bombed.
Iād like to offer my two cents as well. Firstly, I want to highlight that without Stacks, RapidWeaver (RW) would have merely been another template-based web design platform, with little ability to design beyond what the templates could be modified to allow. Weāve seen such platforms come and go. I purchased RW because I needed a simple solution for creating websites, and it offered some attractive templates. However, I soon began to feel limited by these templates. A few attempts at free-form layouts arose, which were appealing. Then Stacks made its debut, bringing with it the ability to create free-form layouts. This was a game-changer; it was inspiring and incredibly useful. Suddenly, we could start fulfilling client requests as they envisioned.
I am confident that RW would not exist today if it werenāt for Stacks.
I find it disappointing that Realmac Software (RM) didnāt duly acknowledge Isaiah and the transformative effect that Stacks had on their platform. The proper course of action would have been for them to negotiate with Isaiah about integrating Stacks into RW, in the same manner that theyāre now developing Elements.
Furthermore, the introduction of Elements was handled peculiarly. It appears they announced Elements when it was merely an idea, perhaps a scheme to increase their platformās profitability. This created a stir among users and developers, many of whom depend on Stacks for some income. I have only one website that uses a template; all the others were created using Stacks.
Like others, I fully support Isaiah, and I believe we should remain patient and wait to see what he comes up with next. When a significant developer like Joe Workman has expressed his perspective on this matter, and has on several occasions mentioned that he is privy to what Isaiah is working on, it seems fair to assume that everything is under control. We can look forward to seeing StacksApp when itās ready for deployment.
Hi @isaiah, is there any possibility of a short update on how things are going at your end with the development of StacksApp
Thanks
@isaiah is holding a Stacks Pro AMA (ask me anything) over on the YourHead Discord. You should head over and ask any questions that you may have about Stacks Pro.
Here is a link to the thread but it may be easier to just open the app and head into #chat.
I was able to get the app to open with this link to the Discord https://yourhead.com/discord
Any release date news from the AMA?