Hacker News Reader

Comment by serve_yay | Hacker News Reader

I don't really know what to say, they've been updating and supporting Transmit forever.

Maybe they are/were different on Mac? The experience of owning Prompt for iOS would be essentially exactly what was described (it never really worked correctly, is still not updated for iOS 7, changelog was, in fact, a recipe for clam chowder, etc.), minus the final "2.0" bullet (which I would love to hear more about: what product did they do that with to cause that bullet to be on the list?).

(To be clear: I am personally entirely fine with the idea that software needs to be paid for, and wish they could charge for upgrades in a reasonable fashion so as to have a real business model; but the emphasis on form over function, with tons of marketing and descriptions about how pretty the software is when core functionality like terminal emulation never worked correctly, is really irksome.)

FYI, I've been on the Prompt 2.0 beta and it's seeming nearly baked: you may not have much longer to wait.

I have absolutely no interest in supporting developers who put form before function in the way that was done with Prompt 1.0, talking about a terminal that is "clean, crisp, and cheerful" instead of "fast, functional, and correct", nor do I have any faith that Prompt 2.0 is going to somehow work when Prompt 1.0 never did. I hear a lot about how awesome Panic is, but I just don't see it: they are selling an expensive terminal emulator that doesn't actually emulate a terminal correctly. I mostly use it at this point because so many people rave about Panic or recommend their products (even at XOXO last week) that I want to better understand the phenomenon, but as far as I can tell it mostly comes down to a marketing pattern of presenting an image that people can "buy into": in this case, the hipster-ish Apple-following development company that cares about the design of products in ways their competitors refuse... sufficiently that people buy these products so they can feel like part of that tribe, leading to recommendations that usually talk more about the company or their website than features or performance of their products. Regardless, the fact that Cydia recommended it to our large base of terminal-using developers for a long time by accident (an internal miscommunication) makes me very sad.

(After writing this, I realize you are probably joking, in that Prompt 2.0 will soon exist and thereby the bullet points will be complete, but on the oft chance that you were serious I have left the previous paragraph ;P.)

> the fact that Cydia recommended it to our large base of terminal-using developers for a long time by accident

Do you have more I can read about this? That is really interesting!

Someone other than me updated the web pages in Cydia that walk people through how to set up and use OpenSSH on their device (which were sort of required, as MobileTerminal's upstream had jumped the shark), and I didn't really think through while reviewing the updates that we were essentially "recommending" Prompt--more than just acknowledging its existence--by linking to it from our pages. It ended up on the page because I do use Prompt for the aforementioned masochistic reasons, and as a lot of other people do when people ask me about terminal emulators I often do list it, so it he person doing documentation naturally recommended it, but essentially funneling all of our users to go buy that product as part of their device setup, given that Prompt really doesn't do a very good job, and some of the most critical software we use (like Cycript) isn't well supported by it, was a mistake. These pages never included the tracking code I used to have (the tracking code that for a while caused me to have the >2% of all objects stored on S3 that I have talked about on Hacker News before), so I half-sadly and half-thankfully have no clue how many people were referred to go look at Prompt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com