svdl, I wondered if anybody was going to take issue with my statement about the scripting language. While I agree with everything you say, I'd point out that eF is NOT writing Poser from scratch, and Poser was not written from scratch with scripting in mind. The scripting engine was "bolted on" to the legacy code a couple of versions ago. Pretty big difference.

Microsoft Word held up as paragon of bug-free software?! It took me half an hour to crawl back up to my keyboard from the floor after reading that one, and another half an hour before I could see the screen for the tears coming from my eyes.

Jackson, I'm glad you completed your manual without Word choking. You could have hit the bug where all the pictures disappear to be replaced with red X's, as I did a few years back. Did you use the master/child documents feature? Not many people do - too many reports of massive file corruption from those who tried to use it, although maybe they finally fixed that as well. I'll also assume that your diagrams didn't sometimes disappear completely when you tried to move them around on the page, as mine often do in my fully updated copy of Word 2003. Were you managing multiple, hierarchical numbered and bulleted lists? I find that it's still a bit like herding cats, partly due to the fact that changing a style in an attached template from within a document doesn't always really change the template's style definition. And since Word now offers to automatically repair document corruption, does the fact that it's corrupting its own data in the first place still count as a bug?

Methinks some selective memory is at work here. Scripting in the office apps works OK these days (unless you're trying to mix WordBasic, VB & .NET ;) but it was a nightmare for a few years when they first expanded WordBasic into VB for Apps and tried to apply it to the other Office apps, particularly Excel. It's still a nightmare in Outlook after all this time.

What is MS Word at now? Version 11? Even throwing away the 4 versions they lost jumping directly from 2 to 6, that's still the 7th iteration of the app, so there are at least 2 versions for Poser to catch up to the MS "standard" of reliability before it is fair to make comparisons. And, since with Office and Photoshop we are talking about the flagship programs of the two biggest, richest development shops on the planet, is it ever going to be fair to make such a comparison?

And yes, I know you said "relatively." I still think it's a stretch.

• Jimdoria ~@>@

Message edited on: 01/11/2006 16:35

• Jimdoria  ~@>@