Re: MAGE argh !

P. Murray-Rust (mbglx@s-crim1.dl.ac.uk)
Sat, 4 Feb 1995 23:09:54 +0000 (GMT)

Please try to moderate your language in this type of mail - I'll explain
why. It's this sort of post that gives rise to flame wars - where the
postings attack each other and which are difficult to defuse. If you
haven't come across this before, it's worth learning about. The best way
of avoiding these is by ignoring them, but since this is a course where
many poeple are using a list for the first time, I've written at some length.

Imagine that you are the author of MAGE (Dave Richardson, who is
a consultant on this course) and you just received this message. It
would make you feel pretty sick. I shall explain some of the background
and hope that you understand that criticism like yours isn't helpful.

Firstly, MAGE is written and distributed freely. You haven't
had to pay any money. The author has done it because he feels it will be
useful, not because he is in the commercial business. It might be
different if it cost $5000.

Secondly, the kinemage idea is unique and has been adopted by
many people worldwide including the journal Protein Science. This
journal distributes *.kin files on disk with each issue and has very
recently decided to post its issues on the Web. This is primarily
valuable *because* the Mage technology has been developed and has been
widely welcomed. Mage allows users to download scripts which will play
an animation of protein structures on their local machine - a
revolutionary concept. Henry Rzepa and I have incorporated the *.kin
format into our MIME types.

Thirdly, the posting is not constructive. It doesn't help to say
that something is 'the worst I have ever seen'. What is the author
expected to do?

Fourthly, from your posting, I assume you know little about
programming. Programming for any of these platforms is a menace as they
all use different technologies. I am extremely impressed by anyone
outside a professional software company who has ported a program to the
three platforms - even the simplest program requires about 500 lines of code.

Fifthly, Dave has worked extremely hard to get this ready for the
course. I wrote him a letter of thanks yesterday.

Peter Murray-Rust (pmr1716@ggr.co.uk) Glaxo Research & Development, Greenford,UK
mbglx@seqnet.dl.ac.uk, http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/pmr.html (Thanks to AlanBleasby)

On Sat, 4 Feb 1995, A.P.N. de Boer wrote:

> Hi There,
> I think MAGE (even 4.0) is one of the worst Mac programs I have ever seen.
> The Mac interface is completely gone and there are several strange error
> messages appearing.
I know little about the Mac, but its whole approach has been to
make software developers conform to its philosophy. For this reason GNU
does not make any ports to the Mac. I suspect that unless you are an
experienced software developer it is very difficult to port things.

> I know this is not the place to complain about that, but I hope the course
> will not make too much use of Mage.

The course is created by the people it is composed of. If some
of those, like Jane Richardson, have created beautiful images to
illustrate Branden and Tooze , and who knows what else, then I would feel
that was worth viewing, even if the viewer was not as slick as possible.

> Sincerely (A very spoiled Mac user),

You will find many other things in this world created by
volunteers which may not be exactly as you like. I hope you'll think
constructively about how you can help make things better.

P.