Do They Make Anti-TUMS®?

Wow. Touched a nerve with those Rixstep folks.

Trouble is, their aim is as bad as their logic. Wait, they don’t use logic.

See, I tried to register for their forum, because, like all the blogging cowards out there, they provide no trackbacking, no commenting. I’m going to have to assume, like all those other cowards out there, they can’t take criticism. Since my approval to join their forums was subject to review by a “moderator”, what I did get back was that they’d changed my username to “GodOfBacksides” and went ahead and filled out my profile page with all sorts of belittling crap I assume they found amusing.

When I wrote that they appeared to be….lacking…in the ability write a simple installer script, they chose to interpret it as “Barbozo has gone on the record to state he’s befuddled with the Rixstep Xfile Test Drive in that it requires two mouse drags instead of one to ‘install’.”

Huh. Think about that. Actually, don’t. You’ll get whiplash. Or at least stretch marks.

So you’d think that they’d worry that people would read such vituperation from them and follow the link to my original article to see just how much of a lame-ass I really am. You’d think. But they didn’t: under the auspices of

Although Rixstep won’t assist the hapless Apple UE ‘engineer’ in upping his page rank they will help you find him if you really feel you must. Here’s a clue: he considers himself a deity when it comes to men’s backsides and chose his domain name with that in mind.

Ow, my sides from laughter.

Nice to know they call men’s backsides “biscuits”, so at least we have that in common. And, “God of Backsides”? How embarrassing that they end up paying me a compliment instead of a homophobic bon mot.

They wrote up a whole page about lil ol’ me, a self-confessed brandishing of wit (though their wit is not so much in the soul as in the limbs and outward flourishes). It has a piquant, Usual Suspects theme, replete with Photoshop (sorry, more likely GIMP) embellishments.

Apparently I don’t know anything about anything. So why am I writing here? Well, at the risk of reanimating their exquisite ire, I’m pointing out just how embittered these folks are.

They accuse my ilk, the much-fabled “Landed Gentry” of Mac development, of “committing murder” and getting away with it. All those tiny, harmless files they eviscerate Daniel Jalkut for are quite easy to overlook if you’re smart enough to know how to construct an installer package. Which they don’t, so again with the ignoratio elenchi. Tediousness of limb, indeed. And for the record, if you use a utility application to build your installer package, the utility typically takes care to remove these “sloppy” files.

For the record, I do not know Jalkut personally, just by (high) reputation, but I do love MarsEdit and that’s all that should matter, is all that matters to me.

They bitch about other developers embedding copies of frameworks into app bundles instead of installing those frameworks in a place where they can be shared among multiple applications, which saves disk space (infinitesimal amounts, considering the sizes of hard drives), but then rixstep bundles all of it’s filesystem glue into its own framework, when, if they really were possessed of spirit of sharing and optimizing, they’d have built out MacFUSE plugins for each filesystem type so that Mac users could transparently work with all those other filesystems without having to know the difference.

But then that might cut into their sales of Xfile. And it’s just too bad because, just the other day my mom called me up, crying, asking me why oh WHY! couldn’t the finder show file inodes? She started calling me all sorts of names because the Finder couldn’t do this for her.

O, the Humanity.

Anyhoo, I was thinking that maybe I should just post a link to the webpage they spent so much time creating in my honor. But you’d follow that link and read their masterpiece and probably become angry or maybe just roll your eyes—or maybe even agree with them. Your choice. But since they insulate themselves from criticism (you can’t comment; you can’t trackback to them; you can’t even post in their forums because they’ll just delete what you wrote. You’ll just have to ingest the fecal matter and end up diarrheic and have to eat a lot of yogurt and then have constipation and then gas and, well, that all will just turn you into a rixstep devotee.

Why these people even bother with a platform they clearly so despise, selling a product that’s useful only to other propeller heads or, worse, IT folks, is beyond me. But they’re welcome to write software for the platform. If they make real money off of a tiny niche of users of a minority platform, more power to them. But then, who really has respect for anyone who bites the hand that feeds them? That disses the thing which owns the hands that they bite? (word has it they block all traffic coming from within Apple’s IP number range). I sure don’t.

And rixstep guys? Xfile’s not a drop-in replacement for the Finder any more than fink->download-package->compile->link->install->read man pages is a replacement for dragging an app into the Applications folder.

The best software is the software that people use and love using by choice and not because they’ve been locked into that software by proprietary file formats or because they invested so much time in learning an inscrutable command set and refuse to let the time-spent go to waste.

You wrote

Everybody loves MarsEdit - but that’s not the issue.

That actually is the issue. The only issue if you’re writing software that you want people to use. If you’ve not learned that, you don’t deserve even whatever small successes you might have.

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