1.2. Acknowledgements

| Chapter 1: Welcome to Inform |

| 1.2. Acknowledgements

I should like to dedicate this new edition of Inform 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.

Among those who kindly gave up great swathes of time to test, and think about, the early Inform 7, I must give special thanks to Sonja Kesserich, who was so often patient, and so often right. Her easy-going "pestering" (Sonja's word) led to improvements more or less everywhere, at a time when using Inform 7 was not much fun. I also thank David Cornelson for gathering volunteers; and I thank them, too.

From the outset, I have thought of Inform 7 as no longer being a command-line compiler, but a compiler in combination with a radically more humanising user interface: all credit for the reference implementation under Mac OS X belongs to Andrew Hunter. I thank him for his forbearance in the face of much cajolery. How simple the metaphor of an interactive book with facing pages may seem, but the coding was an enormous challenge, and I could not have done it.

Though David Kinder's Windows implementation of the user interface does indeed visually follow Andrew's original, the two programs were coded independently, and the programming task taken up by David was formidable indeed. He also uncovered numerous bugs in the compiler which, through one coincidence or another, did not reveal themselves under OS X.

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. Philip's efforts were particularly generous since the early stages of Inform-for-Linux were so tentative: for many months, we weren't sure how to go about the project, and during that time Philip quietly wrote us a solution.

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. I would like to thank 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).

The iconography of Roman mosaics introduced in the June 2010 build of Inform is indebted to artists and craftsmen of whom nothing can be known, except for a few guesses about which workshop undertook which mosaic panel. But we can at least thank some photographers: Nevit Dilmen for the famous Gypsy Girl of Zeugma, now in the Gaziantep Museum of Archeology, Turkey; Mary Harrsch for her excellent photographs of the Orpheus mosaic now in the Dallas Museum of Art, and for images of mosaics from Pompeii now in the Museo Archaeologico Nazionale di Napoli; and Alberto Fernandez Fernandez for a mosaic from a villa in Centocelle, near Rome. And also thank English Heritage, for looking after the Roman villa at North Leigh, Oxfordshire, among quite a lot else. The North Leigh mosaic floor provides the incomplete and complete snapshots used on the Problems panel.

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