First Brent has to deal with the whole Mary Hodder fiasco. Everybody seemed to have an opinion on that. I didn't know what to say. Frankly, I think the big deal people are making about it being beta software is a cop-out. Bugs happen. Does the software come with a guarantee that it won't lose any data? No, and that's not just because it's beta, it's because software (all of it) sucks and we're all lazy.

From what I've read, they both learned lessons from this. Brent's going to do more to make sure people know when they're working with a beta version. (What will he do the first time a a golden release crashes and takes some user's data out with it? Don't tell me it won't happen. All software sucks, and developers who say otherwise are just trying to keep you from looking too closely at our house of cards.) Mary apparently learned to take beta warnings a little more seriously, she learned not to admit to not doing regular backups like the rest of us ;-), and she learned not to harshly criticize one of the most popular individual mac developers on the web.

I wish good luck and a really well built bomb shelter to the creator of the next "production quality" software that crashes and takes out some of Mary's data. It'll be a lot more difficult to convince her of the truth, that all software sucks, the second time around.

(This fact isn't an excuse, but it is reality. It might be cool and fun and very useful, but it all sucks.)

Once that issue finally started to quiet down, Greg at Airbag Industries complained loudly that you have to join a mailing list to get technical support for MarsEdit. That would be ridiculous if it were true, but it's not: just send an email to their support address (as listed on Ranchero's site).

Brent's being pro-active, he actually posted the answer to Greg's question in the comments on the site, but he won't be able to do that for everyone.

On 12/21/04, I said:

>Bugs happen. Does the software come with a guarantee that it won't
>lose any data? No, and that's not just because it's beta, it's
>because software (all of it) sucks and we're all lazy.

Also, I think users tend to exaggerate the importance of a piece of software or some data. Whenever someone refers to something as "mission critical," or "essential to their job," I take it with a grain of salt and start asking some questions.

Not that data-loss bugs aren't annoying. They are. Very annoying.