This thread reminds me of when Firefox 4 came out, people complaining that it's hardly any different to FF3, people complaining that the layout is all different and you can't find anything, people saying nothing works anymore even though it does, people complaining just to complain.
Well Firefox has long been my favourite browser for many years, mainly for its functionality and ability to customise as much as you want. It's the only browser with many diverse extensions (even ones that change the way Firefox runs), you have all the options you want, you can change the layout endlessly, manoeuvrability of all toolbars and icons, many skins, themes etc.
FF4 was a mighty improvement over FF3 in functionality but no one cared about the hard work that went into it. But there’s still people using FF3 more not opening their eyes to what FF4+ offers. Little do they know that FF4+, especially the latest FF8 is the best Firefox to date and it quite easily gives its competitors a run for their money.
With Firefox, we have Norton which has improved but people are stuck in there old ways, we have iPhone4 with people moaning on appearance changes and its comparison to other phones.
(Haha, I just noticed a trend in version 4 here, quick let’s get MM5 out tomorrow and nobody will complain
)
So now getting to my point about the Monkey…I’ve been using MM4 for a bit of now, used it over the beta days and still now. It was only by chance that I installed version 4 with my computer blue screening and the effort of re-installing windows. Yes at first I was a bit confused on the tabs, a bit confused on the collections and a bit confused on minor layout changes and some other things. Once I started using it over time it grew on me and I love the new version. I would honestly say it's a big improvement over MM3 with many bugs ironed out and lots of features to keep everyone happy. I also think it's speedier in comparison to MM3 (which I was using with fewer scripts) in the recent builds.
Only one thing, still don't like MM3-4 monkey logo, and it took you ages to update the website in the UK. Also, with the website, the only changes are Version 3 to Version 4 and “New version 3” with the 3 crossed out with a 4. I laughed when I saw these tiny changes, which took you a good couple of weeks to do. I hope that's not the big website change you promised!
Anyway, back to topic, my monkey will always be my only music software I use with its proper tagging system (with the additional scripts available) and at the same time being a lovely software to play my music on. It's got everything I want and it's not restrictive in anyway and always open to as many changes as it can take. Yes Dreadlau you are right about, we know the theme editor is a bit annoying at the best of times and really cumbersome to change the basic of things. Yes we should changes like a tree with gaps in them to make it look to W7 standard, menus having the W7 basic look and other things like that but it's the icing on the cake in appearance terms (as someone said earlier).
You can't take away the hard work the skinners have done to make MM4 look great. All the new skins from everybody who's contributed look great and they have been producing things that you thought weren’t possible with the basic skinning editor they have.
There's no taking away from the devs too, these guys have working lives, possibly families and kids to look after and they still manage to get things done. They've put up with a lot of moaning, a lot of requests and a lot of problems to overcome and a plethora of other things to cope with. These guys deserve gold medals!
Just to end this massive long (Roving Cowboy) style post
, we should applaud you devs, skinners and beta testers who have made MM4 make it out the window and give us a delight of a software that's better than the previous and has a lot more to offer.
Thanks very much and my hat's off to all of you!
