While I am sure MetaCard will have their own response, my reaction
is that Steve Pothier's anger over the MC timebomb is
excessive.
I agree. And I am him.
While I forget where at the moment, I remember reading
about the timebomb a month or more ago. I do agree that a warning
when you invoke the beta-engine would have been more
comprehensive. Alternatively, the warning could have been permanent
in the beta release with no timebomb so users and developers knew
the risks. MetaCard could simply stop accepting bugs from the beta
release after the final release date.
Part of their problem, I'm sure, is that people report bugs without
saying what version they are using (or worse, incorrectly state the
version).
Also, many of my users don't even know they are using MetaCard simply
because we use stand-alones stacks for dialog boxes in a larger
application. They would be very confused if a dialog box came up and
gave a warning about "MetaCard being obsolete".
-Pothier-