Phantoms delivered this afternoon

[Rufus McDufus]

Going back to AIR and its problems, and a lot of guesswork on my part but hopefully relatively (!) informed guesswork. AIR appears to be built on the QT framework which provides multi-platform capability and a nice environment to develop software fairly rapidly. I'm taking a guess here and thinking that AIR has been based on that framework from conception. Now I don't feel that AIR is a fairly typical QT framework implementation. It has real-time requirements that are fairly uncommon in most apps. It is possibly more low-level in terms of hardware than most implentations. I'm taking a guess that Devialet have become a slave to the framework and its insufficiencies and this had led them up something of a blind alley regarding bug-fixing. I'm guessing they've found themselves in a situation where they can't fix problems because it's in the framework, and that's beyond their control unless they start hacking that framework, which is a dangerous route to start taking.
Linn had a similar problem with Kinsky. They based it on the Mono framework and led them to a situation where most of the issues were being caused by framework bugs or going beyond the capability of the framework. One of the steps they took with Kazoo was to dump Mono, and (I think) build from the ground up. The investment required in time and money to do this was not insignificant.
Now with Dialog at least they have a single piece of hardware on which to develop. From that perspective, with any luck it's going to be a lot easier for them to find quick resolutions, and not to have to rely on third parties to implement framework fixes. I don't know if the SPARK client frontends are a ground-up development or not though?

I could be showing my ignorance here but if I understood correctly Air was originally conceived as a Mac only programme using iTunes as the front end. Version 1 was just about de-bugged when somebody decided to change tack and version 2 was, I believe, a completely different concept and programme. V2 runs on PC and Mac and is a sound-card emulator I believe.
Do you thing Air V1 was based on QT or was that a decision taken when a late decision to completely change Air's functionality was made?
It certainly seems to me that changing tack on Air has had bigger implications than expected.

Ah, it could well be v1 was fairly native to Mac and they decided to go with a QT framework-based version for v2 to run on Windows (and others possibly). I've done a bit of debugging of recent/current AIR through Microsofts 'windbg' debugger (without the source code, which makes it tricky, but you can get an idea) and I  get the impression a lot of their problems may well be due to the fairly sizeable framework around the code which seems to have lots of dependencies on the OS and fairly disconnected aspects (to AIR) of the OS.  I do wonder whether they could just compile it down with a bare minimum of libraries necessary to reduce these dependencies, as a possible quick fix. Of course they might have already got it down to the bare minimum