I agree with you, Sigh... I'm less angry with them than I am sad. Such potential, such a big mess and all of it easily avoided by having placed a short note on the homepage a couple of months ago. They also could/should have left the forums in place with a note that said something like: "The development team will be unable to participte in these forums while GemX does x,y,z. Please excuse our absence. During this period, which will be as brief as possible, we have a diverse, knowledgeable and friendly user base that is very active in this forum. Post requests for help in the appropriate thread and we are sure that someone will be able to help you. Please feel free to continue to post bug reports and feature requests as well and we will attend to them as soon as we can".
Anyway, to get to the point, I have mixed feelings about how to respond to your question. I *did* request and receive a refund for Do-Organizer but that was more about 1. getting GemX's attention (I think it worked) 2. getting a refund while I could in case the company disappeared. I still have a licence for TexNotes Pro (not installed at the moment, though) and *might* be wooed back to GemX under the scenario that you've outlined. There is certainly nothing wrong with their vision and ideas for their products - they just need to work on managing the various projects they have on the go and balancing that with customer service. Customers (well, me
) will put up with a lot as long as they get the sense that their voice is heard and opinions/wants valued. I can't stress enough how simply GemX could have kept my $70 upgrade fee for Do-Organizer... I'd have accepted the bugginess and waited for fixes if they had simply communicated to its customer base, as outlined above.
So, at this point, I'd answer your question with a qualified "yes" - there's a small chance that I'd return to the fold. By this I mean actively using TexNotes Pro. Parting with cash for Do-Organizer would take more than that. For a start, in the immediate future, it would be nice, as the person who started this thread and as someone who has requested and received a refund (I'm betting that I am not alone), if they contacted me directly to express their sorrow that it came to this and attempted to reassure me about the future. I'd also like to hear that Doublewitt had been directly contacted as well... At this point, I think that at least some of their energy should be devoted to re-building a positive relationship with it's existing userbase. As Josh noted, many of us will be posting on other threads in other forums recounting our experiences. This negative "word of mouth" advertising is going to make it difficult to build up a new userbase, let alone recapture/retain its current one.
As an aside (and with apologies for waffling so much), I wonder what became of Chessnia and Chris Tonchev?. I know there were many others who were active on the forum, but those two stick out in my memory. I'd be curious about their reactions to all of this. Chessnia wrote the e-book on Chess... I wonder if I can find him? I'll give it a go.
EDIT: That was easy - message sent!
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- how'd you do it?
Oh well, just have to buy a new one and dual boot my current one... It's only money, right? Please, PLEASE, tell my wife that?
stopped watching when the kid with the Tostido was cleaning the toilet with it...