Hi olio,

> So my question is will Moi continue to be a one man
> 'pet project' or is there plans to expand...hire people...?

Currently I do not have any plans to hire more people.

But that is not set in stone or anything, that could possibly change in the future depending on different circumstances.


> I think there is not much more room to improve with only
> you Michael working on this,

:) I would have to disagree strongly with this, it will definitely be possible for me to improve things a lot in the future.

There have already been a lot of improvements added from v1 to v2, there is a list of all the v2 beta release notes here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html

Why would you think that this progress would suddenly come to a stop?


> if you keep on adding feature how are you going to cope
> with all the maintenance and improving these added features,

Well, one of the key things that I do to help with this is to put a whole lot of effort into making a new feature be at a high quality level when it comes out.

An initial investment to make it work really well at the beginning, helps very much to reduce time spent on maintenance later on.


But certainly there are some limitations on what I can do since I'm only a single person working on this project. Like a Mac port like you mention is a good example of something that is not really feasible for me to tackle. But it is incorrect to extrapolate that into saying that no improvements at all will be possible for me to do, just the progress on v2 alone is enough to show that is not true.


Also there are actually some pretty substantial benefits that come from these limitations. Because my time is limited I tend to have to focus more on bigger priorities and not get side tracked as much. I have to try to make a new feature more polished and finished when it initially comes out, rather than kind of doing it halfway and redoing it later. I have to try and squash bugs when it first comes out so that I don't spend all my time fixing bugs. When people are running into a problem and I'm seeing the same questions come up repeatedly in support, I have to try and eliminate the problem so that I don't spend too much time on support.

Those are all things that have a positive effect on the software quality.


The other thing is that going slowly is "not a bug, it's a feature" :) - going slowly and carefully and taking time to do a better design results in a higher quality and more cohesive interface in the long run.

The interface design is a huge part of what I'm trying to do with MoI, and that tends to be an area that actually goes downhill when there are more people working on the software especially when they are focusing more on finishing things quickly.


One way to ruin the simplicity of an interface is to just add a whole bunch of functions into it really quickly.


Once the simplicity is lost it usually tends to be gone forever, it is not easy to reclaim it after it is gone.


Interface simplicity has a lot of benefits - it greatly helps for new users, but another thing I've also found is that experienced people can benefit from it as well due to increased speed when there are qualities like fluidity and economy of workflow that are part of the simplicity as well.

- Michael