Protean IDE`s Future

Just incase any Protean users have missed Robs statement on the official Protean site,

"As many of you are painfully aware, Protean has not been developed further for months now. This is a regretable situation that can no longer continue.

I am currently in the process of both flattening the website and cleaning up the source for public consumption. At which point there will be a source code and a final binary version available for download (minus web services).

Finally, I will go into more detail when the release is issued."

Hopefully some skilled coders here will carry on ironing out the remaining few bugs in this great IDE and maybe update it properly for BMax.

Jason.

Yeah, great. Right after I bought it, it got dis-continued. Oh well. It could've been so nice to have the nice stuff working for Bmax. It's great that bmax support is broken now as well. Sure, it was a beta version, sigh. Doesn't make the situation better though.

I someone can fix the Find in Files bug that would be great as it means that you can't properly make multi-file projects!

good, this will become the standard once it has been updated

Exactly how I've been feeling for the last year. Rob discounted Protean last Christmas and, after we bought it (me for the touted BlitzMax version), he stopped working on it - COMPLETELY. If anyone wants my copy now, they can have it... I wish I'd donated the money to the author of BLIde.

The thing is, everyone who bought it for the beta went against what he advised, which was to not buy it for the beta.

Rob is a good friend of mine and I know he never intentionally went out of his way to upset people. Daze, Wiebo, obviously the fact that a full BlitzMax IDE release was never promised means nothing to you, so you just go around bad mouthing a guy who poured a hell of a lot of hours into protean.

What you do have is a fully working IDE for Blitz+ and Blitz3D and just because Rob ended up getting a full time job, with full time hours (plus the fact he was studying at uni pretty much all through development) gives you guys the right to be total @#!*s?

Well shame on him for getting a well paid job which just hapens to make sure his has a roof over his head...

At least you’ll be able to get the source code now and fix it yourselves eh?

Gah! enough said... If I say what I really think I'll wind up with a ban.

I got exactly what I paid for, a full featured B2D/B+/B3D IDE. As Noel suggested, anyone who bought Protean for BlitzMax wasn't paying attention to the already slowed development cycle.

I certainly never received any communication from Rob to that effect (and I have communications from him dating prior to my purchase), nor did I read anything to that effect. It certainly was IMPLIED that the Max edition would be receiving further work and, as such, I based my descision to buy Protean partly on that fact.


So much for being neutral, eh? I'm sure we're all pleased that Rob found a good job, but that is neither here nor there.


No, but it was IMPLIED. No one here is claiming anyone made any promises.


Wrong. It's not fully working - There are numerous outstanding issues that are unresolved (bugs). Just take a look at the Protean forums!

Anyway... I guess it's all irrelavant now that the source code is going public... I have hope that, in the hands of the community here, Protean will become the IDE it very nearly was.

Can you edit and compile your source in it? Then it's fully working. Just because there are a few bugs remaining doesn't mean it's unfinished or broken. Most of the bugs I see on the forums are small things that don't affect the core features in any way.

I don't see the point in continuing to complain about it. You aren't going to get another release, and you aren't going to get your money back. Get over it.

Get real! If a piece of software claims to offer functionality/features that clearly aren't "fully working", then how can you claim said software is "fully working". That is a ridiculous statement...


Look, you're clearly not looking at this though unbiased eyes, so let's leave it. You're sticking up for your mate.. I get it already.


LOL - Did you even bother to read my post before replying?


Good night.

It was never advertised as a fully-functional BlitzMax IDE and Rob did say that you shouldn't buy it just for the beta. Because you missed that is not an excuse, you should have known better than to buy it while it was in beta. You have only yourself to blame for this, as this is not a case where you can legitimately blame your tools.

Just because it was implied does not mean it was promised. As I said before, you have only yourself to blame.

I seemed to have missed the edit at the bottom there, how stupid of me.


Someone needs to get in touch with reality here, but it isn't me. We're talking about Protean, not ProteanMAX. I'd wager you're the only person who would say Protean isn't fully working. Do we say that BlitzMax isn't fully working because there are bugs here and there? No we don't, it does what it was advertised to do, just like Protean.

Rob isn't my mate, I'm simply telling you that you got exactly what you paid for, as did everyone else.

Btw, you still haven't mentioned a single one of these advertised broken features that is stopping you from using Protean.

Years.


Well you certainly never recived communication from Rob or anyone else to the opposite of that effect either. In fact there was no 'Buy Now' button for ProteanMax. So I don't see how you got so confused.

Or were you one of those people that bought MacMax and consequently thought you bought a beta PC product as well? In which case higher power help you...


Yeh. So @#!* happens, life got in the way and you appear to be blaming Rob personally for that.


He actually is (the final clean up release) and he's still complaining. =]


The only feature I know of that is advertised on the product page that is broken is find and replace. Which never really worked in the first place =]


Amen.

Oh dear. That's right - I added that after you posted [sigh]


It is. You claimed Protean was a fully working IDE for Blitz + and B3d. That clearly is not the case. BTW: My argument against your "fully working" statment refers to the B+/B3d edition of Protean. No one has ever claimed that the BlitzMax beta release can be deemed fully working.

Jeesh! I tried replying to your post but you're changing it that quickly I've given up.

ANYWAY... Protean does possibly have a future, as long as the Blitz community embraces it and continues to develop it. Fingers crossed...

.

Sorry Toby - I'd already edited that out as I didn't want to elaborate. It wouldn't have achieved anything, so I removed that particular statement.

I bought it and barely used it. Couldn't give a stuff. Just... FINISH YOUR GAMES.

Yeah what OEJ said.. FINISH YOUR GAMES...

ARgh so much time wasted refreshing forums for new posts.. why? why?

People developing things and then getting bored is a common theme, look what happened to 3D pipeline. I'm just preying Mark will sort some official support for b3d models out when BlitzMax3D comes out.

quote from noodle: The thing is, everyone who bought it for the beta went against what he advised, which was to not buy it for the beta.

He didnt mention this to me, maybe in a threat somewhere on some board or something... But you know, offering the IDE at a discount, right after bmax was released, WITH a max beta version sure does fire up the expectations of a new customer. I'm not saying that he didn't communicate that Protean was being discontinued (how would a non-customer know about the slowing of the development cycle of an app he doesn't own?) but he sure wasn't clear about it. Reading the posts on his board I can now see he INTENDED to keep supporting it, but he got his head in too much work. Understandable, but poorly communicated from a bussiness point of view. (or good, depending on which side you are on) because as a customer I don't care about the personal circumstances of my supplier.

Anyway, don't worry, I got over the loss of money and frustration... I just wanted to clear up why I mentioned this at all... :)

Exactly Wiebo. Well said.


Same here - I felt frustrated more than anything. I'm really hoping Protean lives on because it has the potential to be the IDE of choice...

I don't own Protean but when considering purchasing an app developed soley by an individual, I see continued support/updates as a bonus, really. I would only purchase if the product, in it's current state, does what I need and is worth the money just for that.

The risk of a single developer becoming unable to provide continued support is pretty high, as in this case. From the sounds of it, the author is just as disappointed that he can no longer offer updates. As such, at least he's going to make the project open source so that someone/anyone else can continue with it's development. This is to be admired.

"I'd wager you're the only person who would say Protean isn't fully working" No, I'm another as the 3rd post in this thread says. I bought protean (NORMAL not MAX) because it was able to handle multi-file projects and because it had a find in files feature (BLIDE has neither capability) but the find in files function doesn't work! It crashes. I was hoping that would be fixed as it seemed major (to me) but after months of inactivity on the Protean forums I gave up. I did complete Xmas Bonus in Protean but was dissapointed not to be able to structure it as a proper multi-file project because I have used Find in Files for YEARS as areally quick way to find the funtion/variable I want.

Having said all that, I can understnad why the guy has no time to finish it and releasing the source is good.

protean max was as seperate product, it was Protean that people bought. As far as I'm aware that worked fine and I look forward to using it :)

With an open source version, things can get better if people choose to share the wealth.

Just wondering, what language Protean is actually made in and how easy it will be to actually add things to it ourselves, wasn`t it Net based? How easy is that to use?

Jason.

c# afaik. I'm interested to take a look at it.

One thing I'm wondering about, is that it uses a 3rd party component for the text editor.. I dunno how that will affect the open source thing? Will people be able to use that component?

*edit*

@quicksilva - c# and .net in general are just awesome to work with :)

I think it uses SynEdit, which is open source and available on sourceforge.


Bahhh, Delphi 7 is just awesome to work with :)

Well, you're wrong there, Qube.

It uses Compona SyntaxBox.

Who the HELL said I was neutral? I sure as hell didn't. I am defending a friend because you insist on taking sly pop shots at him in your sig and in every other post where you mention protean.

If you have a problem you should have perhaps emailed Rob in the begining and asked for a refund?... that goes for ALL of you who are quite happy to stab the guy in the back cause you know that he NEVER visits here and is damn unlikely to see it, unless he's pointed to the thread.

It won't be something most people here can jump straight into. An understanding of VB .NET 2003 (thanks Noel) is a must... Also the IDE makes much use of some 3rd party pay-for libs, which means if anyone were to take up coding for it, would either need to buy the libs or reimplement related sections with a new lib/new code.


The text editor part is Compona Syntaxbox. BlIDE uses the SyntaxBox now, admittedly it's not open source, but it suggests SyntaxBox is not a pay-for lib for he right people. It probably won't be distributed with the Protean sources, but anybody who payed for Protean got the associated dlls, so there's nothing to stop them using them. Except for legal/moral issues that may arise. I guess Rob/Compona could be contacted with related questions.

Actually, last I checked it was written using Visual Basic .NET 2003. So, you'd probably have to use that unless you want to go through the pains of building it in multiple languages.

As for distribution of Compona SyntaxBox, it's LGPL'd (news to me), so it's legal.

coulda swore that Rob told me once that he wrote it in C#... But it's a moot point really as the languages are so close to each other (and you can mix and match them in the same program)...

I suppose this is where I jump in and add my side of the story?

First of all, it was not my intention to fleece anyone with Protean! Barring a few issues here and there, my own opinion is that Protean is by far and wide the best solution for Blitz 2D/3D and Plus. I'm not even going to argue the toss over the Max stuff, make of it what you will, the fact is - it's incomplete.

As to what happened, I poured probably about two and half years of blood sweat and tears into Protean to make it the editor it was. When Max was in development, I spent months working on the Max editor, in between university assignments/exams and other life crap that popped up, and I still wasn't making a big enough dent in the work load. Oh, and to top it all off, just as Max was being released, I had to leave for the states for 3 months, at which point, I was without a PC. I always intended to get back to working on Protean. It just never happened.

However, if I am completely honest, I lost interest in the project for many reasons. First of all, I stopped using Blitz a long time ago, for the most part. Secondly, working on a hobby project for 2+ years, it gets boring after a while, I didn't like the fact that my hobby was starting to get boring. Thirdly, I stopped using VB.NET and moved over to C# and .NET2 and some of the third party controls do not work in .NET 2 at the moment.


A few facts:

- The large majority of the code is VB.NET, not a million miles from Blitz, most people who now use Max know at least the fundamentals.

- With a little bit of work, the code can be compiled with NAnt or a 3rd party compiler, you won't *NEED* VS.NET to recompile it.

- There is a large amount of unfinished/unused Max work already in there that isn't going to take a lot of effort to get going again.

- There are somewhere near a quarter of a million lines of code in Protean (including Xml comments, excluding third party control source).

- There won't be much in the way of fixes in the final release.

- I've ripped out the Web Services framework, and those will be taken offline sooner or later.

- There are three third party controls in Protean, all of which are no longer a problem (one of the main reasons I didn't Open Source the project earlier). The Compona SyntaxBox, Divelements SandDock and Divelements SandBar, there were free versions of these controls (for free software), however the free versions were discontinued. I will be releasing the source with the free versions of the divelements controls. As stated, the SyntaxBox has just been LGPL'd: http://www.puzzleframework.com/wikiengine/WikiPageViewer.aspx?ID=90


Finally, I'm sorry to see people so upset with me/Protean. It was never my intention to leave Protean in the state it is currently in. I hope someone has the time and skill to update the editor.
Those of you who paid for Protean, massively furthered the development of the software. Without those of you who bought Protean, there wouldn't be a product to open source now, as I would have had to get a job much earlier :)

I'm hoping to get the final release with source out before or just after christmas, I just need to sort out the third party controls and trim the fat.

If anyone has experience of running a online CVS workspace and wants to lead further development of Protean, please get in touch.
I will be around to offer any assistance I can with the code, but I don't have enough time to lead further development of the Project.