Quote: Hey Allan, I'm just curious - what prompted you to write Kixtarter. Do you have a long history with Kixtart and just wanted to "give something back" to the community, or were you just bored one day and looking for a challenge - what motivated you (and still does) ?
-Shawn
btw - I'm not "going anywhere" with this question ... just wondered.
I think it started with a basic text editor I wrote for the "fun" of it. It was like notepad but worse. Then I was editing KiXtart scripts one day and doing some VB6 programming at the same time and said "hey...I should write a editor for this". When I started I wasnt very good at KiXtart at all (still not really). So the first reason I wrote it was to learn all the commands and make it easier for a new person to write scripts. The insert wizards came out my own lazyness of looking up commands in the manual...especailly that darn messagebox coding. Now I've been converting our VB6 and MS Access apps over to VB.Net at work and I kinda use Kixtarter as a learning tool....see what works and what doesn't. I've used parts of this program in a couple others and vice versa since writing it....the time I've spent on it probably equals the time I've saved on other projects (o.k....probably not but its how I justify it). Its kinda challenging and in a twisted computer dork way kinda fun. Especially when you finish a bunch of changes (like this last beta) and you look it over and say "Wow...thats not half bad".
My only complaint is I never know how many people out there are using it. When it was postcardward (the first 1.5 years of its life) I got no postcards. Since its been donationware (last 4 or 5 months?) I've gotten no donations, not really surprising considering I didn't get a single postcard. I had 200 downloads of the .msi install file off the server last month alone, month before was about the same, so I know people are downloading it. I'm debating making people register v3.0 when I release it just so I know whos using it and from where. IIt wold be free to use as it has been but I just really want to know. Haven't decided yet though.
I think I'm rambling, hope that answers your question.
