UPDATE: See the comment below. Huw from Sapphire Steel agrees. Ruby in Steel no longer has the same evaluation experience.
I’ve always been interested in Ruby on Rails development. The rapid adoption and growth of Ruby as a language and Rails as a framework has been inspiring. Unfortunately, it has yet to grow beyond the ranks of early adopting alpha programmers. Much of this can be blamed on the lack of an easy to use, fully integrated IDE for development. Developers like things like syntax highlighting, intellisense, refactoring tools and interactive debuggers. Until yesterday I had yet to come across an exceptional IDE for Rails development. So, my consideration of RoR for any reasonable sized projects was nil.
Yesterday I came across Sapphire Steel’s Ruby in Steel package. It’s an add-on that sits on top of Microsoft Visual Studio and integrates all of the features I expect from a proper development environment. Sweet! What I don’t get, however, is the ridiculous “nag ware” mentality Sapphire Steel has propagated throughout the experience. Various actions in the IDE force me to shoo pesky windows.
It makes absolutely no sense. I installed this product. I’ve been offered 30 days to try it out. Those 30 days should give me such a stellar development experience that when the sands in the hourglass run out I don’t even question the $199 license fee because I can no longer work effectively without it.
It’s hard enough to convince customers to choose your product based on its ability to fulfill needs. Don’t make the job even harder.