Hi Michael,

I hear constantly of feature requests, and the respond is always, if I work on that X then this Y will suffer. If asked about a Mac version then that will be a year only working on that!. Features are being lined up to do in V3 or V4 or even later... because it is only possible to work on one thing at a time. I think everyone here understands what I am talking about...

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

I think there is not much more room to improve with only you Michael working on this, if you keep on adding feature how are you going to cope with all the maintenance and improving these added features, development is already showing signs of slowing down (due to too much workload on one man) and soon Moi will lose it's edge.

olio - You feel that developemnt is slowing down?

I think Michael is plugging along quite well with the new features. One of the goals is not to end up with Rhino or Solid-whatever in terms of so many features you don't use most of them. I don't have a Mac but I can see your point of the possible user group that is not being capitolized on. If he were to dive off into that though it would probably require a clone of himself to keep the standards just as high as they are now.

Keep in mind that even by himself he squashes bugs and provides little helping scripts and such faster than any other developer I've heard of with a whole developemnt team.

Hi Grendel,

Yeah I feel it's slowing down, the focus is mainly on new stuff right?, there was half a year on organizing stuff, recently it has been displays, what about the core modeling tools?, when the feature list grows, there is less time to spend on each topic.

I wholeheartedly agree that I have not come across a more helpful, more hard-working and smart developer, but Michael you're not superman man:)...

Surely there must be room to expand, and get another developer in or too outsource some stuff... stuff that has been mentioned to implement, are some layouts and dimensioning tools, basic renderer possible some kind of sdk of some sort, the list goes on...

Now the Moi enjoys having the best nurbs to mesh mesher around and has a competitive price. Next version is going to cost 300$ That is 1/3 of what Rhino cost, and they have what 10 delvelopers?. What happens when Rhino finally redoes its mesher, that would take alot from Moi, what about Moi great display engine? In Rhino v5 they have really made improvements and it's really fantastic with realtime shadows...

What I am saying Moi don't think about expanding it's business and want to remain a one man company, then it will be out of business very shortly.

an extra note, does it really makes sense that michael the brilliant software writer, is taking 1-2 months to write the manual?

That point really shows the limitation of a one man company!

Hi Olio. I don't think it's really slowing down. But i will take a guess and say what really happens is V1 beta seemed to develop very fast because we did not get to watch the initial building period. The project was in work for a couple of years before anybody even knew about it. That time was probably spent laying a lot of fundamentals for V1 feature set. But maybe there were new fundamental pieces which need to be built for V2 features? I'm just guessing of course...

On the other hand what you mentioned is true that old features also need maintenance and improvements. So if one man handles this plus new features at same time it will seem like slowdown. But probably it's all handled at same speed as before, minus the recent introduction of Michael's new son. But little Zane deserves some attention from Daddy too! Even if the older brother is a little bit jealous... :)

olio, you've clearly never tried to write technical documentation. It's incredibly slow and time consuming, far, far, far more than you'd expect it to be. Three months to write a complete set of docs for something as large and complicated as MoI already is would be very fast.

Personally, while yes, there are lots of features I'd love to see done, I'd much rather see the current level of quality continue, and MoI continue to be viable as a product.

---> Next version is going to cost 300$ That is 1/3 of what Rhino cost
small bug in your statement, dollar ist not euro. Rhino cost 995 Euro.
That's what happens when one man is too fast, hehe

I don't see the slow down you refer to.
You don't seem to know much about software development cycles either.
I think Michael has managed to add a lot of new features for the next release; Scene management, layers etc... were all critical to have in Moi.
There were also a lot of small changes throughout.

A big advantage of this being as you call it a 'pet project' is that Michael is very quick to respond to user's requests and adapt moi accordingly.
Try this with larger software companies. I find the term slightly demeaning though, considering how professional the development and the product are.

I think the point Olio is making is that for a one-man software developer, as the software grows in complexity, development slows down.

Every change requires testing, documentation, and responses to the forum. All takes time away from core development.

Every company that launches a product is trying to meet a window of opportunity where the product fills a need that no competitors can match. But successful products invite competition. The challenge is maintaining your lead and keeping customers from jumping ship.

I'm facing the same issue with my one-man company. I work 16 hour days and have more ideas than time. I can't grow any further without adding people.

Michael is doing a great job and hopefully he'll grow to a point where he can add resources.

Ed

Yes, I have no doubt about the complexity of making a manual, that's why I would understand if this work was outsourced to keep momentum going to improve the software instead of the manual.

Thank ed (EDDYF) for making the point a lot clearer!

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

>> 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 expire and hire more people.

Expire? Lol. Freudian slip. :-p

Hi olio,

> Now the Moi enjoys having the best nurbs to mesh mesher
> around and has a competitive price. Next version is going to
> cost 300$ That is 1/3 of what Rhino cost, and they have what
> 10 delvelopers?. What happens when Rhino finally redoes its
> mesher, that would take alot from Moi, what about Moi great
> display engine? In Rhino v5 they have really made improvements
> and it's really fantastic with realtime shadows...

The part that you're missing here is that you're thinking that you can compare things just by assembling a bullet list of features and lining them up.

That's simply not true - the interface of a product is not something that is easily summarized in a bullet list like that and for quite a lot of people the interface is really what can make it possible for them to actually use the product at all!

- Michael

Hi Nick,

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

> Expire? Lol. Freudian slip. :-p

"expire and hire" had a certain ring to it I guess... :)

Hi olio, the other thing that I should mention is that there will often be a kind of natural slowdown that happens near the end of a beta release cycle like where we are right now.

Even though I try to do a "pay as you go" type development approach, there are still loose ends that need to be tied up at the end, and also I get even more cautious near the end to try to avoid introducing bugs since there is not as much testing time to find them when it is near the end.

So I expect that there will likely be a kind of slowdown near the end of any beta period, that's just a normal part of the process.

I guess it would be possible to avoid this slowdown but the consequence would be a decrease in quality. And a decrease in quality tends to mean that extra bug fixing time will be required in the future, so it is not necessarily even saving time in the long run.

- Michael

Please Oh Please remain a sole proprieter, small business.

I recognize MoI's unique mission and it's solitary pursuit. I cant wait to see what is coming next. I believe suprising results are in store for me over the next 5-8 years with regard to MoI.

If you sell MoI to DAZ productions, I would be happy for your family, Michael...I would stop using MoI.

>What happens when Rhino finally redoes its mesher, that would take alot from Moi

Moi's still have a quite different angle in core drawing and modeling, a simplicity and intuitiveness which has not been seen often in this field.

For me Moi3d does the job every time, with the least resistance in execution.

Please stay on this track!

Marc

Yes... please stay on this track!
THe joy of working in MoI is it's inherent simplicity and intuitive character. It works just like it should and that happens only with very careful planning and focus that can't happen with multiple threads.
cheers,
eric

>What happens when Rhino finally redoes its mesher, that would take alot from Moi

Well, this would be something to see! See Rhino "Redoing it's mesher", in it's current, "overbloated" state, is going to be, quite possibly, an impossible task as, in the words of the original creator of the application, one of it's shortcommings, that was built in from the begining and an admitted (failure if you want to call it that, possibly better to call it vision) was it's lack of planning in the UI and care taken to have it be managable in the future.

Good luck with hoping Rhinos mesher is going to be able to keep up with MoI's!