Feed away! It's about time the Mac developer community started to stand up to this guy. I've come across his juvenile rants from time to time and been amazed that he continues to get away with it. "Who the hell is this rixstep guy?", I've Googled, to little avail. Your blog post was soreley needed.
The worst part, really, is that any good points he may have to make are completely overcome by his vitriolic attitude. If he noticed an application accidentally included a .Trashes folder or some unnecessarily large image files, what's wrong with a polite e-mail to the developer? Even the post about CTGradient he links to, while coming across as slightly rude to some people, at least inspired a bit of reasonable discussion until he stepped in and turned it into a flame war.
What a sad, angry, pathetic little man.
schwa
· 2 years ago
Thanks Chris,
Appreciate the comment. We really don't have to suffer the nutjobs.
Joe
· 2 years ago
There's a few people on the internet that I just don't bother to read or comment about. The critter above is one of them. I couldn't even figure out some of his ravings (I must be kinda dumb then - obviously) - but he's just not even relevant.
You're kind of feeding the "energy monster" with this post, but I do understand the desire to swing back when that fastball is coming at you. Maybe consider that you just knocked it out of the park (see! a gruber-esque baseball reference!) and leave the poor sad monkey alone. We'll all be better for just ignoring him/it.
Best of Turkeyday to you!
schwa
· 2 years ago
Hey Joe,
I've been fortunate enough to completely miss Rick up until now. The first I heard of him was on Ankur's "optimisation" blog post. Practically the next thing I know he's posting that "Johnathan Right" post.
Yeah I'm sure Rick is just thriving on this. I figured that's the way these kind of people work. He's obviously screaming for attention and just needs a big hug. Not much I can do about that.
But Rick has been ignored for a long time it seems (do not mention the spiteful vindictive batshit insane elephant in the room) and I'm not going be the victim of his abuse.
Jacob Rus
· 2 years ago
Yeah, you're feeding the troll, and giving him traffic, but someone needed to take this guy down a few notches. He's been getting away with such bullshit for years.
Jacob Rus
· 2 years ago
Also, in the "Postscript" section of his post, entitled "Johnathan Wong", did he just call you a gay pedophile?
schwa
· 2 years ago
Jacob,
Yeah, looks like it. He's throwing any shred of credibility he had left out the window.
Scott
· 2 years ago
Ha! Yep, he also pisses on me on his web site. And I don't think I've ever even talked to the guy.
But he gets 100% of his facts wrong, at least on me. He also has info on there about me is simply scary. Nobody ever calls me by my first name, yet he does. I don't think it's out there anywhere. And every other thing he writes about me is also wrong.
His contact page says that you must be polite and respectful, but he isn't.
I've also seen him at least once claim a guy was an Apple engineer when, in fact, the guy was a Genius at an Apple Store.
Kevin
· 2 years ago
You know as a Texan I think I should be offended by something here...
I lived in TX for 6 years. I loved it there and would move back in a heartbeat.
Axxel
· 2 years ago
I think my favorite part of his post is the snark about the number of downloads and reviews for your hobby apps on VersionTracker. The download counts he's bashing on are actually larger than the downloads for the current version of his actual pay-me-money-for-this bundle product, and not that far off his all-time-all-versions totals for all his products. And his review comments are actually worse.
Of course his market has to be limited. How many users really need a reimplementation of 'strings'? Or a 'swap file' app whose major accomplishment is apparently to call exchangedata(2)?
One would think the cognitive dissonance of his rants and his own failure in the market would eventually break him. Sadly instead it seems to just make him more bitter. If you read his site in rough chronological order its hard to miss the increasing levels of vitriol and a tendency towards more ad-hominem attacks. Its all really very sad in a cry-for-help kind of way.
Jon H
· 2 years ago
I think he tried to unsub me from Apple's cocoa-dev list after I posted to that ctgradient thread.
A few hours after I posted, I got an email from the list server asking me to confirm.
maggie Wight
· 2 years ago
it seems to me that half an hour sitting in the naughty corner would not do him iny harm it worked for you Love mum
Innocent Bystander
· 2 years ago
Mr. Wight, you have a wise mother. :-)
matx
· 2 years ago
I've been wondering about him and that website for years. Some of the rants are simply lunatic. Thanks for your post. I don't think you're fanning the flames, as much as calling it like you see it. I've really wondered why no one said anything earlier. I guess everyone was just trying to ignore him. Egads.
John C. Randolph
· 2 years ago
As it happens, I am acquainted with a few people who really are "internationally acclaimed and respected", and not one of them has any need to proclaim this on their web site.
-jcr
Ilgaz
· 2 years ago
I think you have give him enough material to keep his webpage busy for months. Remember the rule not to feed trolls ;)
Dr. Ian Silvester
· 1 year ago
I feel it is necessary that I should redress the balance here. I shall start by saying that I am a paid-up user of the ACP software suite published by Rixstep, just so y'all don't think I'm trying to pretend to be an impartial observer who has just wandered in. There are two points I'd like to make.
First and foremost, I find your comments about the quality and utility of his software both inaccurate and offensive. Have you actually used his software may I ask? If you did I'd be surprised if you'd still make such comments. The Haiku link you posted is 5 years old and no longer relevant; whilst indeed game implementations will not set the world alight, his Xfile (file manager) and SPX (Gutmann-quality file shredder) are unique pieces of software in the OS X arena in that they actually do what they say on the tin, and in the leanest fastest code I've witnessed - Xfile consumes a mere 168K on disk. I think the developer has earned the right to comment upon the (lack of) quality in others' software - his I have found excellent.
Secondly regarding the man himself. Mr. Downes is clearly a man unafraid of stating his opinions, and stating them in the strongest terms possible. Since those opinions often run against the grain of the received wisdom concerning the quality of Apple's products it is inevitable that he will run into flak for what he has to say. His style may be caustic, but if you review his written output you can't help but notice how often he has been right on the money. Arrogant and even rude yes, but not wrong. Let's not let the messenger's style drown the message content.
Regarding the "Landed Gentry of Mac Development™", I have to say I observe the same movement - a loose group of software developers who slap backs and describe eachother's products as "way cool" and similar, yet whose approach to software development seems to me (and it would seem to Mr. Downes) slapdash and rather 'MacOS' in style, harking back to the bad old days before OS X hit the streets. To put it simply, software development should be about software quality foremost and cool graphics second, not the other way around.
RonArt
· 1 year ago
I found this thread by doing a search for 'rixstep' (via Google). Now I see that ricky is also seen as major prick by others. I can't imagine any longer pluging in my admin password to his software. Maybe there's a reason why it's free? Visiting his site for a little advice the jerk went ballistic on me simply because I had forgotten to include some info to his request. I'd NEVER had someone go off on me for no reason as he did. And I've been using computers for decades. The guy makes me think he's a major tweeker from how incredibly hostile he is. Just out of curiosity... I tried going to his website and now I can't even load the home page... incredible! What a prick!
Watts
· 1 year ago
To put it simply, software development should be about software quality foremost and cool graphics second, not the other way around.
Maybe Xfile is "the absolute fastest browser ever" as claimed and works best with ZFS, but in terms of what might be called "things most Mac users actually need," it's not fit to tie Path Finder's shoelaces.
But you seem to be entirely missing the point here, Dr. Ian: maybe ol' Rick has, in the last five years, gone from someone writing inexplicably useless front ends to Unix commands to The Best Cocoa Developer Ever. But he's apparently a complete prick.
Are you even reading the complaints people are writing about him? He writes obscenity-filled, slanderous rants about developers who say things he doesn't agree with. He tries to unsubscribe people he's in arguments with from mailing lists. He screams at users of his own software when they ask for technical support.
Here's the bottom line: the first element of being a "professional" is professional courtesy. It is abundantly clear that the Rixster couldn't spell "courtesy" if he was getting direct hints from the ghost of Noah Webster.
Jonathan
· 1 year ago
I've stumbled across this post purely by accident (I have reached it after reading the last review of CLIX on macupdate.com, via another blog that was linked to there as it suggested I learn something about the developer of CLIX before I downloaded it... this turned out to be far more than I had bargained for).
You know what, having read the articles you've linked to I suggest you sit back and take a good look at your own behaviour in this sorry episode as, from what I can tell, the special kind of idiot here is actually you Mr. Wight. I seriously suggest you read articles before citing them as the "drug trafficking" and "spamming" ones you link to (and the whole "Trouble in Paradise" series of posts that they are a part of) achieve the complete opposite of what you so blatantly intended (that is, to infer that Rick Downes is in fact a drug trafficker and spammer, as opposed to having apparently been maliciously accused of being such by what you would probably call a "nutter" and suffering false arrest as a result). Also, you might find out the potential reasons as to why Mr. Downes might just have a soured view of other people and suffer from a mighty big chip on his shoulder:
Tragedy no. 1. Not many years ago, he was made a paraplegic by what he evidently believes to have been medical malpractice.
Tragedy no. 2. Having established himself in what he evidently thought would be "paradise", he was apparently falsely arrested purely on the basis of ridiculous hearsay and sheer ignorance on the part of the Cypriot police, which led to a tragi-comic, multi-year legal process which is still ongoing and during which he has been shafted left, right and centre by many people he considered friends that he could trust. Also, his property - his work computer, a Powerbook by the sound of things - was seized and never returned to him, even though the charges were finally dropped almost two years later after being dismissed as pure fantasy on the part of the person who initially laid them.
Tragedy no. 3. From what he writes, it appears that no. 1 and no. 2 impinged on his ability to work, probably led to him becoming an alcoholic and royally fucked up his life and his enjoyment of it and made him an extremely bitter person.
Now, does that excuse him being rude and offensive to people - absolutely not. However, does it make you look like a complete jerk for not bothering to read articles you cite, and laying into someone in the exact same fashion as Mr. Downes has done. Yes it does.
Also, if you had read the articles you would have shrugged his criticism off as being from someone who just might have a few issues that they (very understandably) aren't dealing with very well rather than writing a stupid blog post about it.
A special kind of idiot indeed.
Ronald Lanham
· 9 months ago
I wonder whether his attitude may have actually lead to his becoming disabled? What goes around... And I have personally seen strange things happen to people in hospitals when they are pricks.
Dre.
· 1 year ago
Wow, reading that crap from rixstep, I find it hard that an actual human could write something so stupid.... wow..... someone forgot their rabies shots thats for sure...
Jon
· 1 year ago
I find it amazing that you wail over him devoting a page of his website to you on the page you've dedicated to him. That you accuse him of character assassination and immature name calling in while calling him a nut job, stalker, and drug trafficker. Beautiful!
I think you both need a time out to think about what you've done.
Jeff
· 1 year ago
Welcome to the club! I got a couple of whole pages from them where they belittled my name, made up a whole lot of shit about me.
Why? Because I called their "Xfile" app a piece of shit from UI-standards point of view and that they were pimping that "IT-personnel-oriented" stillbirth as a "drop in Finder replacement". All from my posts: http://www.godofbiscuits.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-sear...
Their hallmark, though, outside of feeble ad-hom attacks, is the wall themselves off:
- no way to challenge what they say on anything - and as they complain about OS X bugs that haven't been fixed, they stopped using Apple's official way to report bugs, then BLOCK OFF ACCESS TO THEIR SITE from all 17.x.x.x addresses (Apple's entire IP range).
It's the most deranged and self-damaging site I've yet to see.
They're like ill-trained monkeys flinging poo and humping on a Mac keyboard.
kent
· 1 year ago
I too incurred his wrath, when I had the audacity to question him on a technical point from the vantage point of my 30 years in programming. In return, I was publicly slandered with outrageous lies. My suggestion is simple: stay away from him.
schwa
· 1 year ago
Hey Kent, sorry to hear that. But yeah, keeping away from. I do chortle with amusement at the guy whenever I hear another rix-story.
Ronald Lanham
· 9 months ago
Totally agree. He became incredibly hostile to me simply because I was asking for tech support years ago. Then he actually banned me from entering his site at all! The guy is a total nut case so I warned people on MacUpdate and VersionTracker a long time ago and it appears to have had an effect. There have been almost no post on either of these sites regarding his software 'CLIX' after I posted URLs to check out just what the developer community and the judicial system think of him. :))
All Comments
The worst part, really, is that any good points he may have to make are completely overcome by his vitriolic attitude. If he noticed an application accidentally included a .Trashes folder or some unnecessarily large image files, what's wrong with a polite e-mail to the developer? Even the post about CTGradient he links to, while coming across as slightly rude to some people, at least inspired a bit of reasonable discussion until he stepped in and turned it into a flame war.
What a sad, angry, pathetic little man.
Appreciate the comment. We really don't have to suffer the nutjobs.
You're kind of feeding the "energy monster" with this post, but I do understand the desire to swing back when that fastball is coming at you. Maybe consider that you just knocked it out of the park (see! a gruber-esque baseball reference!) and leave the poor sad monkey alone. We'll all be better for just ignoring him/it.
Best of Turkeyday to you!
I've been fortunate enough to completely miss Rick up until now. The first I heard of him was on Ankur's "optimisation" blog post. Practically the next thing I know he's posting that "Johnathan Right" post.
Yeah I'm sure Rick is just thriving on this. I figured that's the way these kind of people work. He's obviously screaming for attention and just needs a big hug. Not much I can do about that.
But Rick has been ignored for a long time it seems (do not mention the spiteful vindictive batshit insane elephant in the room) and I'm not going be the victim of his abuse.
Yeah, looks like it. He's throwing any shred of credibility he had left out the window.
But he gets 100% of his facts wrong, at least on me. He also has info on there about me is simply scary. Nobody ever calls me by my first name, yet he does. I don't think it's out there anywhere. And every other thing he writes about me is also wrong.
His contact page says that you must be polite and respectful, but he isn't.
I've also seen him at least once claim a guy was an Apple engineer when, in fact, the guy was a Genius at an Apple Store.
As for Texas developers... well there is always: http://www.idsoftware.com/
Kevin
I lived in TX for 6 years. I loved it there and would move back in a heartbeat.
Of course his market has to be limited. How many users really need a reimplementation of 'strings'? Or a 'swap file' app whose major accomplishment is apparently to call exchangedata(2)?
One would think the cognitive dissonance of his rants and his own failure in the market would eventually break him. Sadly instead it seems to just make him more bitter. If you read his site in rough chronological order its hard to miss the increasing levels of vitriol and a tendency towards more ad-hominem attacks. Its all really very sad in a cry-for-help kind of way.
A few hours after I posted, I got an email from the list server asking me to confirm.
it worked for you
Love
mum
-jcr
Remember the rule not to feed trolls ;)
First and foremost, I find your comments about the quality and utility of his software both inaccurate and offensive. Have you actually used his software may I ask? If you did I'd be surprised if you'd still make such comments. The Haiku link you posted is 5 years old and no longer relevant; whilst indeed game implementations will not set the world alight, his Xfile (file manager) and SPX (Gutmann-quality file shredder) are unique pieces of software in the OS X arena in that they actually do what they say on the tin, and in the leanest fastest code I've witnessed - Xfile consumes a mere 168K on disk. I think the developer has earned the right to comment upon the (lack of) quality in others' software - his I have found excellent.
Secondly regarding the man himself. Mr. Downes is clearly a man unafraid of stating his opinions, and stating them in the strongest terms possible. Since those opinions often run against the grain of the received wisdom concerning the quality of Apple's products it is inevitable that he will run into flak for what he has to say. His style may be caustic, but if you review his written output you can't help but notice how often he has been right on the money. Arrogant and even rude yes, but not wrong. Let's not let the messenger's style drown the message content.
Regarding the "Landed Gentry of Mac Development™", I have to say I observe the same movement - a loose group of software developers who slap backs and describe eachother's products as "way cool" and similar, yet whose approach to software development seems to me (and it would seem to Mr. Downes) slapdash and rather 'MacOS' in style, harking back to the bad old days before OS X hit the streets. To put it simply, software development should be about software quality foremost and cool graphics second, not the other way around.
Now I see that ricky is also seen as major prick by others.
I can't imagine any longer pluging in my admin password to his software. Maybe there's a reason why it's free?
Visiting his site for a little advice the jerk went ballistic on me simply because I had forgotten to include some info to his request.
I'd NEVER had someone go off on me for no reason as he did. And I've been using computers for decades.
The guy makes me think he's a major tweeker from how incredibly hostile he is.
Just out of curiosity... I tried going to his website and now I can't even load the home page... incredible! What a prick!
Maybe Xfile is "the absolute fastest browser ever" as claimed and works best with ZFS, but in terms of what might be called "things most Mac users actually need," it's not fit to tie Path Finder's shoelaces.
But you seem to be entirely missing the point here, Dr. Ian: maybe ol' Rick has, in the last five years, gone from someone writing inexplicably useless front ends to Unix commands to The Best Cocoa Developer Ever. But he's apparently a complete prick.
Are you even reading the complaints people are writing about him? He writes obscenity-filled, slanderous rants about developers who say things he doesn't agree with. He tries to unsubscribe people he's in arguments with from mailing lists. He screams at users of his own software when they ask for technical support.
Here's the bottom line: the first element of being a "professional" is professional courtesy. It is abundantly clear that the Rixster couldn't spell "courtesy" if he was getting direct hints from the ghost of Noah Webster.
You know what, having read the articles you've linked to I suggest you sit back and take a good look at your own behaviour in this sorry episode as, from what I can tell, the special kind of idiot here is actually you Mr. Wight. I seriously suggest you read articles before citing them as the "drug trafficking" and "spamming" ones you link to (and the whole "Trouble in Paradise" series of posts that they are a part of) achieve the complete opposite of what you so blatantly intended (that is, to infer that Rick Downes is in fact a drug trafficker and spammer, as opposed to having apparently been maliciously accused of being such by what you would probably call a "nutter" and suffering false arrest as a result). Also, you might find out the potential reasons as to why Mr. Downes might just have a soured view of other people and suffer from a mighty big chip on his shoulder:
Tragedy no. 1. Not many years ago, he was made a paraplegic by what he evidently believes to have been medical malpractice.
Tragedy no. 2. Having established himself in what he evidently thought would be "paradise", he was apparently falsely arrested purely on the basis of ridiculous hearsay and sheer ignorance on the part of the Cypriot police, which led to a tragi-comic, multi-year legal process which is still ongoing and during which he has been shafted left, right and centre by many people he considered friends that he could trust. Also, his property - his work computer, a Powerbook by the sound of things - was seized and never returned to him, even though the charges were finally dropped almost two years later after being dismissed as pure fantasy on the part of the person who initially laid them.
Tragedy no. 3. From what he writes, it appears that no. 1 and no. 2 impinged on his ability to work, probably led to him becoming an alcoholic and royally fucked up his life and his enjoyment of it and made him an extremely bitter person.
Now, does that excuse him being rude and offensive to people - absolutely not. However, does it make you look like a complete jerk for not bothering to read articles you cite, and laying into someone in the exact same fashion as Mr. Downes has done. Yes it does.
Also, if you had read the articles you would have shrugged his criticism off as being from someone who just might have a few issues that they (very understandably) aren't dealing with very well rather than writing a stupid blog post about it.
A special kind of idiot indeed.
What goes around...
And I have personally seen strange things happen to people in hospitals when they are pricks.
I think you both need a time out to think about what you've done.
Why? Because I called their "Xfile" app a piece of shit from UI-standards point of view and that they were pimping that "IT-personnel-oriented" stillbirth as a "drop in Finder replacement". All from my posts:
http://www.godofbiscuits.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-sear...
Their hallmark, though, outside of feeble ad-hom attacks, is the wall themselves off:
- no way to challenge what they say on anything
- and as they complain about OS X bugs that haven't been fixed, they stopped using Apple's official way to report bugs, then BLOCK OFF ACCESS TO THEIR SITE from all 17.x.x.x addresses (Apple's entire IP range).
It's the most deranged and self-damaging site I've yet to see.
They're like ill-trained monkeys flinging poo and humping on a Mac keyboard.
He became incredibly hostile to me simply because I was asking for tech support years ago. Then he actually banned me from entering his site at all!
The guy is a total nut case so I warned people on MacUpdate and VersionTracker a long time ago and it appears to have had an effect. There have been almost no post on either of these sites regarding his software 'CLIX' after I posted URLs to check out just what the developer community and the judicial system think of him. :))