I think part of the tension evidenced on the list is frustration over the delayed release of FB^3 and the doors it will open for us. I would hate this to be misconstrued as criticism of Staz & Company. Staz and Andy are craftsmen, and I am confident when FB^3 is released it will be a streamlined state-of-the-art Macintosh development platform. More than that, it will come with documentation you can actually understand, and that alone will set it aside from all the "big boys." I also understand Staz's "David vs. Goliath" financial struggle to get it FB^3 that point. (They've got the product, but a good dose of marketing genius wouldn't hurt.) We've all seen buggy software products prematurely pushed out the door by bean counters only to suffer ugly deaths. None of us want that for FB. Nevertheless, the wait's a killer. When I see a gifted programmer like Mars disappear (I know he's dropped out of sight before and later reappeared), or Frank and David leave for another platform, or Ross fold IB and move on, it's discouraging. When I see a generation of coders moving into object oriented programming in native PPC IDEs-- witness the recent RB posts-- I wonder if I'm being left behind. Is it time to make the jump? Do I need CodeWarrior and C++? Which direction should I point my children? But the saving grace of FBII (my copy, v2.3.1, has as its latest copyright 1995 which, in computer years, is almost anachronistic. Of course, updaters have offered some relief) has been it's ability to take you deep inside the bowels of the Mac, right into assembly for those who want to go there. (Am I wrong, or in recent months has there been a shift in posts with more and more delving into assembly and Toolbox calls from FBII?) This ability, I believe, is why we are still here, and still writing competitive, successful apps, albeit in 680X0 code. While the majority of us are at least conversant, if not expert, in handling PeeCees-- some ambidexterous coders out there develop on both the WinTel and Mac-- we all choose Macs because "we know." We also choose FB because "we know." But FB^3's delay does give me one reason for concern: We all use QWERTY keyboards, not because they're best-- Dvorak is far superior-- but because QWERTY was here first. Most of us probably use ZIP disks, not because they are best-- most of our drives eventually will succumb prematurely to the "click of death" and probably take a few disks with them-- but because ZIP was here first. I would hate to see FB^3 stumble because other IDEs "were here first." Of all the languages I have ever seen, FutureBasic does the best job making event-loop programming understandable. In fact, learning it is probably the easiest stepping stone to other, more complex languages. It's my hope that I won't ever need to make that step. Ken ___________________________________________________________________ Ken Shmidheiser Systems Administrator/General Manager Internet: kshmidheiser@... Fax: 606.679.9225 Somerset, KY 42502-0221 Phone: 606.679.4266 ___________________________________________________________________