why is FM's UI so weird and buggy?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:28 -0800 26/2/13, Robert Lauriston wrote:

>Thinking about the bizarre UI bugs Rick Quatro reported today, I'm
>wondering how the product got to this sad state.

I remember being told a long time ago that the pre-Adobe versions of FrameMaker were so efficient on the limited hardware of those days because a lot of the code had been optimized in Assembler. This and other factors would make it a very different application internally to something that has been designed from the ground up using a more modern code base and techniques, such as InDesign.

With this as a starting point, it might go some way towards explaining why the attempts to 'Adobify' FrameMaker post-FM8 have been hard for the guys doing the work.

None of this would justify poor UI design or testing, though.

-- 
Steve [wondering why he bought FM10]