RE: Bob's super helpful EI usage guide, you can also find this in our knowledge base here: http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20090222.asp

ORIGINAL: Willy Jones [Cakewalk]

RE: Bob's super helpful EI usage guide, you can also find this in our knowledge base here: http://www.cakewalk.com/support/kb/kb20090222.asp

ORIGINAL: DonM

Noel:

The commensurate professional. Thank you for this post. I deeply appreciate your respect and collegiality with the user community in this type of communication that you so frequently provide us. You and your team deserve much credit for your work and the excellent support you provide us.

Take a well deserved rest and as soon as the weather breaks we'll drive up to Boston and wash and wax your car.

-D

ORIGINAL: Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]

Hi Danny,

Good questions. I don't have answers for all of them but I can try.

>>Now that this release is probably what most (as well as you guys at Cake) would be happy with, will you still have a
>>strict deadline to put out a Sonar 9 or whatever by October?

That's been Cakewalk's business model forever - We do need to make money :-)
Anyway, that's not an area that we in Engineering are directly involved with as far as decision making goes.

>>To me, this is really what 8 should have been and with this version I fully retract my previous statement of "S8 is a
>>modded version of 7." :) 8.02 worked well for me so in reality, it was "my" final version. But this is just insane with all
>>the new stuff and I'm grateful.

In the software world EVERY version is a "modded" version of the earlier. Good software design allows you to build upon what you have rather than reinventing the wheel each time. It would be disasterous if companies started fresh with every new version. Its stable now because its gone through the evolution it has. That said every year we refactor (to use a technical term) some things that need rearchitecting.

>>2. When you do go to make a 9, will you use this code and just add more insane enhancements?
Yes, more insane enhancements :-)

>>I guess what I'm getting at is, (and I mean no disrespect) I would really hate to buy a new version in October and deal
>>with bugs/errors. I know that October is a long way off, but to be honest, I'm not really looking forward to a new Sonar
>>until this time next year. I feel this was a totally new Sonar and could have easily been S9.

I'm glad you think so but the scope of the things that went into 8.3 is relatively tiny compared to what went into S8 the main release. I understand your perspective as an end user though. We don't strive to release versions that have bugs intentionally but any developer will tell you that bugs are present in ALL software. Its all about whether the bugs present affect a significant percentage of the users that determine whether the software is perceived as buggy or not.
Good software process that we attempt to follow strives to minimize this percentage.

>>3. Do you feel that 8.3 may have been a ground-breaking template for possible versions in the future that may be more stable?

Yes and every version we release typically becomes a template for the next in this way.

>>But do you think the extra work you've all done here may literally raise the bar from your standpoint for the future?
We strive to raise the bar on stability every version we do. As I said above its all about how much of the end user experience we cover in our testing. The test matrix for SONAR is mind bogglingly massive so its physically impossible to test every user interaction with the program. This is where our beta testers help out.

>>4. How long do you use some of the core codes before you decide it's time to totally rebuild them from the ground up?
We still have a few pieces of code that Greg Hendershott wrote back in the early 90's :-)
We change code when rearchitecture is needed. However code is always being modified. I don't have numbers but in S8 itself we probably changed hundreds of thousands of lines of existing code.

>>On our end we just sometimes look at things in the light of "look, it still doesn't work...we don't care if you worked on it 3 months!"

Our end users are musicians and engineers. Its our job to understand how to make our software feel stable and productive to people without them having to think about it. In a sense it can actually be less frustrating working on it from our perspective. You are the guys sitting in front of it ever day for hours. In that environment the slightest hinderance tends to become a major frustration. We try and address these sorts of issues when we become aware of them.

Thanks for your feedback.