1.2. Acknowledgements

§1.2. Acknowledgements

Inform 7 is dedicated to Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, whose shrewd and sceptical suggestions made a contribution which can hardly be overstated. A long email correspondence with Andrew entirely subverted my original thoughts about natural-language IF, as he convinced me that the "new model" of rule-based IF was a truer foundation; while Emily's wry, witty analysis and how-about-this? cheered me at low moments, besides providing the impetus and often the specifics for a lot of the best ideas.

From the outset, I have thought of Inform 7 as no longer being a command-line compiler, but a compiler in combination with a humanising user interface. All credit for the reference implementation under Mac OS X belongs to Andrew Hunter. How simple the metaphor of an interactive book with facing pages may seem, but the coding was an enormous challenge. In 2014 Toby Nelson, my brother, put months of time into the project by rewriting and modernising the Mac OS X application: sandboxing it for the Mac App Store, giving it a more contemporary design, and much more. He continues to maintain it today.

Though David Kinder's Windows application does indeed visually follow the OS X original, the two programs were coded independently, and the programming task taken up by David was formidable indeed. Philip Chimento's Gnome-based user interface for Linux became officially part of the project in November 2007, when the first easy-to-install packages for Ubuntu and Fedora were offered. Adam Thornton gave invaluable assistance in the closed-source age of Inform to make generic Unix binaries available, too.

While Inform is not strictly speaking a project of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation (IFTF), it benefits enormously from the Foundation's good work. In particular, the Narrascope conferences were invaluable in the period 2017-2022, and I thank Judith Pintar and Andrew Plotkin for arranging speaking slots at them.

Inform in its widest sense incorporates work by so many people that it's simply impossible to thank all of them, but Zed Lopez, Dannii Willis, Mark Musante, Brian Rushton, Dan Fabulich, Hugo Labrande, Erik Temple, Ron Newcomb, Eric Eve, Justin de Vesine and Juhana Leinonen all deserve special mention. Many hundreds of users have filed patient and careful bug reports, keeping us on the straight and narrow. They're contributors, too.

The original development of Inform 7 was a long haul, and I would particularly like to thank Sonja Kesserich, David Cornelson and other volunteers for their early testing of a then-fragile system. The final months before the Public Beta release of Inform 7 were made more enjoyable, as well as more productive, by fruitful discussions leading to a cross-platform standard for bibliographic data and cover art. Special mentions to L. Ross Raszewski, who wrote frighteningly efficient reference software in frighteningly little time; the librarians of the IF-Archive, Andrew Plotkin, David Kinder and Paul Mazaitis; and my fellow authors of IF design systems - Mike Roberts (of the Text Adventure Development System); Kent Tessman (of Hugo); and Campbell Wild (of ADRIFT).

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