[Paraview] stability of paraview

[Mike Jackson]

<rant>
    What I am seeing is that you are moving to a cross-platform GUI  
toolkit and not actually USING part of it. I mean, if you stick to  
the QT apis what is the deal with mac support? It is built INTO QT.  
It is _harder_ to NOT have mac support than to actually include it.

    So what you are doing is FORCING me to PURCHASE a NEW computer  
because somewhere someone simply decided that Mac support was not a  
priority. At the moment I am sitting in a room full of Researchers  
from the commercial, academia and government sectors and the Mac/PC  
ratio is just about 50/50.

   This absolutely flies in the face of every marketing survey done  
and is what I am going to presume is what Kitware basis it's decision  
on. That decision is just plain WRONG. I am going to guess a good  
portion of your market is Scientists, Researchers, and Engineers.  
This particular market has a much larger number of Mac users than the  
general part of the market. I would suggest a serious rethinking on  
that priority. The longer you take to get Paraview in a workable  
state the more users you are going to lose. Each one of those  
Engineers is going to tell his colleges that Paraview doesn't work  
and try something else. I know I do. This will just keep spreading  
and my NEXT YEAR when you finally decide to release support for OS X,  
most of the people who would have used it and became loyal users, are  
now using competing products. And to top it off, they are now telling  
all their colleges how well the competing product works.

    I was told in the past by Kitware employees that Macs were not  
supported because they were so slow that no one at Kitware wanted to  
use one. Take a look from under your rock. I now have the exact same  
hardware that Dell is running. I have the speed. The machines are not  
any more expensive than a comparable Dell, IBM, or Toshiba.

   And to top this off, you _could_ purchase a MacBook Pro and Dual  
Boot XP and OS X on it. That way your engineer could work in what  
ever system he/she needed at the time. But to just outright dismiss  
OS X is a mistake in my not so humble opinion.

   I can not believe there isn't one Mac guy at Kitware? There is  
usually at least one per company. Sometimes they are in a "closet",  
so you have to dig them out. Buy them a Shiny new Mac and let them  
have at it getting ParaQ to compile and run cleanly on OS X.
</rant>

--------
Mike Jackson
imikejackson <at> gmail <dot> com


On Jun 13, 2006, at 3:54 PM, Berk Geveci wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> I would like to remind that our Mac support is at alpha stage at  
> best. I have mentioned many times on this mailing list that a  
> stable Mac build is not a high priority. We release Mac binaries  
> and try to help with the build process so that Mac users are not  
> completely left out. However, judging ParaView's stability based on  
> how it runs on a platform we do not officially support is not fair.
>
> We will focus on getting ParaView 3.0 work well on the Mac in the  
> next months. Switching to Qt for our GUI toolkit will make this  
> process easier. ParaView 3.0 will be at alpha stage hopefully  
> before the end of the year and will be supported on the Mac.  
> ParaView 2.6 (to be released in the fall) will still use Tk and  
> will not be officially supported on the Mac.
>
> -Berk
>
>
> On 6/12/06, Mike Jackson < imikejackson at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 12, 2006, at 4:31 PM, Peter J. Bismuti wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi, here at Boeing we're contemplating using Paraview as one tool  
> for
> > visualizing solutions from an in-house CFD code (Navier-Stokes).
> > There is
> > concern that an open-source produce won't have an acceptable level
> > of QA.
> > There have been some reports of frequent crashes.  Anybody care to
> > share
> > their experiences or opinions?
> >
> > Thanks
> > Peter Bismuti
> > Boeing
> > _______________________________________________
> > ParaView mailing list
> > ParaView at paraview.org
> > http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview
>
>
> For starters, Paraview will NOT run on an Intel Based Mac. With that
> out of the way, Paraview 2.4.4 from Kitware's site tends to crash a
> lot on me, like every few minutes or so. I have no idea if it is my
> system, my data set, or paraview. I have not tried compiling Paraview
> on Windows to take that part out of the equation. Just my experience.
>
> Like every other software package out there, save often.
>
>
> --------
> Mike Jackson
> imikejackson <at> gmail <dot> com
>
>
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