For my main site, I continue to use RW5 and Snow Leopard, both of which are stable.
I’m not interested in changing the site theme or including different stacks, etc. to those I use already.
For my three new sites, I’m using RW6 on a new iMac (El Capitan). Usually I publish a site and work on the content live but this time I’m writing the content first, so I’ve no idea whether the publishing feature will work (I’ve tested the connection and that’s okay.)
I don’t know why the upgrade to RW6 was free, perhaps because RW is unstable and we unsuspecting were being used as guinea pigs? (My regular developer/supplier of RW stuff intimated that RW6 was nothing special and frankly I now agree. Tinkering with the look of the user interface at the expense of stability.) The last straw was RW6 failure to save and save as (which lost me a few hours work) so to be on the safe side I’m now compiling content in a different app for copy and paste in due course. I’ve since read from search of this forum and discovered that save and/or save as work when actioned from edit mode rather than preview (or vice versa, I can’t remember which.)
Will I upgrade to RW7?. The proposed cost is alright so not a matter of price. My buying criteria depends upon whether the new features are of any benefit to me for the style of sites I have, also whether other users find it more stable than RW6.
The main reason for not upgrading Snow Leopard was a hardware peripheral compatibility issue that has been resolved. But although my printer/copier/canner (A3, duplex, laser) can now run on El Capitan, I like using my other apps on Snow Leopard and any websites that suggest my browser should be updated are either ignored or visited via Firefox.
There comes a time when software developers run out of ideas so to keep their businesses going simply play around with what is otherwise a solid product by adding gimmicks (features) that for the most part are nothing to write home about, and not worth the cost of the upgrade. New customers don’t know any different - they buy the latest version - but regular customers with older versions do. So, whenever that time arrives for the developers and it becomes obvious from the offerings, their regular customers either stick with what works or skip a few upgrades until it gets to the stage at which the latest version does actually offer far more benefits to the customer.
Realmac have several products which rather suggests, at least to me, that it has never made consistently as much money out of Rapidweaver as it hoped, so has had to supplement its revenue from unrelated products, the latest wheeze being Typed which by all accounts is not as successful as hoped. Since RW’s target market for customers seems to be people wanting to have a website for personal or family use. also micro-businesses, I dread to think that the price of the RW7 upgrade will include Typed, because in my view its interface is amateurish and unsuited for a professional services website, such as mine, where content is serious and prospective customers are affluent enough to avoid using the youngster greeting ‘hi’. I don’t know why the RW founders have allowed a host of developers to latch on - frankly I think it’s good that they have done, because without the range of different themes and add-ons, RW would be nothing special - but I should’ve thought the way forward, assuming Realmac want to grow the business, would either be to come to some financial arrangement with third party developers* so that RW gets a percentage of each sale, or redesign RW so that it comes equipped with stacks or equivalent, so that the cost of building a more than basic website doesn’t add up disproportionately. Which brings me to my last comment on this post: has anyone else noticed how many USA developers have increased the cost of their themes, and adds on, etc. What used to be about $10-15 has rocketed to $29. The phrase ‘rip-off’ springs to mind.
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