DISQUS

awilensky · 1 year ago

It's easy to say that the acquiring costs for the twhirl client should not have been more than the nominal development costs for an identical AIR client, but I beg to differ - there should be an offset. One reason, really, is that the developer, Frederick, was an early adopter of AIR, and predictably fought through many of the teething issues of AIR's memory leaks. We can argue the size of the offset, but in the end, he delivered a superior handling client, and gained some critical experience in an immature platform - taking that in-house (they hired him, as well, I gather) is not trivial.

Philippe Bradley · 1 year ago

On the one hand, I agree with you - as I said, they get a get what is probably a good inhouse AIR developer (though they could probably have hired him without buying his existing projects, so that can't be the only motivation).

But then again, as I said, there are plenty of alternative Twitter clients, including AIR ones, that are equally as good, if not better. Just as people assume Twurl is a better client because everyone uses it, being first on scene does not make something inherently better. Credit to him for being an early-early adopter, and coding through a beta phase of a framework; that's proof that he's not a *bad* coder - but it's not evidence that he's logically any better than what's out there at the moment