Ok so this may disgust people to think of, but LiteStep could be made *very* marketable with only a few additions.

1) A fool-proof installer. Omar's installer kicks ass but apparently some people still have troubles.

2) A theme-designer app.. Sort of like one of those web-page designers like FrontPage or something (sorry, I don't use those so that's the only one I know of). Where you can just drag-and-drop your stuff from a list of tools, add your skin drawings, set certain options for certain things, and have the program whip up the config files.

That's all I can think of right now and dinner's ready.. something to think about tho!

1 - omar's installer is really close, give it a little more time(:

2 - try out lstm2 under downloads -> litestep utilities

You were right, that's disgusting.
Just to play devil's advocate, it is an awesome program, and would make bucks. Not sure if M$ would be too happy though...

LS isn't about marketability...its about configurability.

I personally haven't had any problems with omar's installer, I find it perfect :) I've just read posts on other boards about people having troubles with it..

Devilboi: and painting isn't about marketability, it's about art, but painters have to eat too.. (not that I personally woudl stand to gain a cent if litestep were to start a marketing campaign)

Besides, one doesn't have to sell the product. The product can be offered for free and the author/owner can make money by charging for their support time.. (ie, consulting gigs setting up enterprise-level businesses with large-scale deployments of interfaces custom-designed to the tasks the individual stations will be responsible for, etc)

I wonder if I'm opening a can of worms here...

1) Do you really think it's intentional that those people "still have troubles"? If those "things" were easily fixed it would have been done a looong time ago.
It's much easier to say certain things than actually doing them.

as much as "we" (ie the community) want litestep to become more mainstream and more accessible to the general public, it won't be for quite a long time. mainly because of the fact that litestep does require some computer knowledge beyond "look ma, I can turn it on and play solitaire!!". which, unfortunately, 98% of the world is still at (just guessing at the number). those people will always have problems, just because they don't know how to troubleshoot theme/module errors. it's not their fault, they're not stupid, they just don't know computers like we do. and that's basically the gap we're facing: litestep requires the user to be somewhat of a "power user", otherwise they won't know how to do anything, and they'll get frustrated and uninstall it. and as much as we say "read the docs and you'll be fine", well, yeah, the docs will make sense if you're advanced enough in computers to understand what they're saying. but most people aren't. just like most people can't just read a book on c++ and code whatever they want. no matter what we may believe, it's just not that easy.

I disagree highly deuce. Anyone can figure out litestep based on the documentation. Some specific modules have esoteric documentation that even a seasoned DB programmer couldn't figure out without emailing the author, but for the most part the docs are more than adequate. The problem isn't the content or the format, it's the presentation.

People are intimidated by text-file configuration, especially when there's a dozen or more conf files. (imho that's the only reason anyone in the world uses IIS over apache)

I don't know if specifically having a GUI drag-and-drop type of configuration author program would fix that.... (ie, if you like the theme you have but you want to have something that's not dragable pop up somewhere else, open the theme in the program and it'll let you drag something somewhere or give it a new set of images or whatever..)

Certainly wouldn't do anything for me, doubt I'd even download it ;) But I'm sure it would entice a lot of would-be users to take the jump.

well, apparently you've never done any type of user support work. cause sorry, but most users will not read docs. then again, there are some that will read every single sentence, but still understand none of it. you need to recognize the fact (no offense intended) that, yes, we can configure litestep, and we enjoy making it work and figuring out any problems we come across. however, the kind of marketing you're talking about wouldn't be focused on us, it would be focused on joe everybody. the kind of person who can't even replace a hard drive, let alone read through pages and pages of documentation and configure his shell piece by piece.
and, this is not even taking into consideration the fact that most people don't WANT to spend time configuring their system. they want to buy the system, plug it in, and start using it right away. if it takes too long, they get frustrated and pissed. most people wouldn't care how configurable and customizable litestep is. they would just see that it's difficult to get it to work how they want it.

don't get me wrong, some people will see litestep's benefits, and not care about it's downfall's, and they will jump into it head first. but most people won't. they may try. a lot of them may. until they see how complicated it can be.

inhaler: the main problem with this drag'n'drop program is that modules don't tell ls or anyone there settings ( aside from the docs) ideas are out there to fix this but i don't think any 0.24.x series will see any of these. 0.25 should be a different story. the current plan is to have it 0.25 introduce whole new ideas and design. and has been the plan for a while. google LS pheonix & raptor. this is not what it will be but one idea that didn't finish.

i think that LS could be marketable if and when .25 or something makes it M$ style foolproof. The problem remains that doing this may reduce that flexiblity that we know and love/hate.

This is all i could find and i got it from phar0e's site i believe.

"Shortly after this time (March I believe) a new "state of the step" report was released by the dev team. It spoke of the still unreleased .24.6 and the dev team was still planning (at this time) to get it out and off their back. The report went on to detail plans for the now infamous "raptor" and "phoenix" projects. Phoenix was the code name for the .25.0 strain of Litestep. Raptor was a shell core services thingy that in theory any shell could run from\to. Not sure exactly how to explain that, but anyway it was a joint project between the LS devs and the Geoshell dev. It was a bold ambitious new direction with much promise but also required much in the way of development time and expertise. Another direction that was laid out was the separation of Litestep's core files from the UI modules (ie: popup, wharf, shortcuts, etc.). That direction has remained even till today. Despite that, work has continued on those UI modules and several alternative ones have been developed as well."

Of course that was in 2001, Pretty vague, anyone else want to enlighten me, im actually kind of interested in this.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/raptorplatform/
you can see an implementation of it in geoshell r5 (cancelled but still availible in the geoshell cvs)

Phoenix was cancelled too, there are many radicall changes to be made for 0.25, but there wont be a release in the near future.