on 9/14/05 11:22 PM, Jud Spencer at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > On 9/14/05 10:30 PM, "Bryan Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Is anyone else still having databases go corrupt every few days? What could >> I be doing wrong? >> >> As a side question, is Entourage even still being developed? The developers >> have been eerily quiet on the lists lately, which makes me wonder if they're >> all over working on .net now... > > I'll contact you off-list...
I don't know if this will fall on deaf ears, but it is something I have wanted to put out there for some time. If it can be passed on and change the way things are done, that would make it worth while. Since Claris Emailer, I have been on a quest to find a better email app, I found that in Entourage, I am quite happy with the app as it is now. That does not mean there are not a ton of things that need to be dealt with. I am going to go out on a limb here, but its getting to the point where I feel Entourage would benefit greatly from a full stop on new features, and they spend a year in a bug fix and performance tune cycle. I know this is not going to happen, but some compromise of that needs to be made. Putting aside specifics, is the very way in which we as end users interact with the development team, it is far too mysterious. Help->Send Feedback has been in a state of massive confusion for months on end now, with plenty of complaints since it was changed, and to this day, no official word on why it is so hard to send in feedback, or why it has not been changed back. Please don't get me wrong, this is going to come off as harsh and unruly, but it meant in all regards, to be constructive. At the core of the issue is that end users can not report bugs, check the status, and track them. Apple finally got this right, look at what they are doing with Safari with the public source downloads you can build, look at Hyatt's blog, which tells so many details I am not entirely sure how he gets away with it :-) I could probably rattle off a handful of issues and inconsistencies with Entourage in emails to support, but that takes time, and if I can not see it in a database, where I can check who it has been assigned to, and if it has been validated, confirmed, declined, etc, its just not worth my time. Any bug report I am going to send in would take 30 minutes to write up, test case, and prepare supporting test case scenarios. To do this 10 times and I have a lot invested to only send it into a web form that I am not sure anyone even reads. Microsoft, you need to open this up, I don't see the harm in it one bit. If you look at how something like AdiumX does this, it shows how well it works. Now I am not saying their app is nearly as large, and they are a 2 man shop or so, so they can make decisions without a 1000 page paper trail causing them trouble. However, it would be worth it to put up a bug tracker, and get the devs and end users to use it. Even if you have to apply to get in, so be it, better than nothing. I have asked to be on the beta test for years now, and never been invited. The sheer number of apps I have been in beta test on kinda puts me in a position to be a fair worker at it. It would simply be better, to let all users be beta testers. Just put them to work on the final release, and put up a bug tracker. Now on to the nitpicks :-) Microsoft needs to just come out and say, yeah, we are going to support spotlight. Either that, or rip out the current engine that is used for searching and use something else, it is just not cutting it. A real index driven database to search through with performance that does not kill the app is needed. It would be best to just support spotlight, there is no reason not to, its a technical issue. Right now, the only user conclusion to the lack of official word on spotlight integration can be one of two: 1) Bureaucratic secrecy and poor cost analysis. 2) The developers are not smart enough to pull it off. I doubt it is #2, so it must be #1, which leads me to think the code base can not support it without considerable effort. Now, call me crazy, but with this Intel hoopla, I was hoping that would almost force a E-rage rewrite, and while painful at the start, we all know how glorious it is when you can roll out new features on new clean code in 1/10th the time. I sit on a Dual G5 with 2 Gigs of memory. Just popping into 4 email accounts sends both CPU's into the 30% range. God forbid there are a few emails there for it to pull down, as that can really toss it into a performance suck. Example: as I have been typing this, some emails came in, for which the performance degradation causes me to be able to type faster than e-rage can keep up. The connection manager in E-rage needs an overhaul, any email server admin can tell you, the time to take and release connections to the remote server is so bad that you can literally tell what email agent an end user is using just by parsing out your server logs. Accessibility issues for disabled are just off. Entourage does not follow the way other apps work in this regard at all. It needs to, period. Text handling needs work. The whole Monaco issue is maddening, perhaps to only 1% of users, but it is one that no other app I use shares. Double clicking on a word selects a trailing space, which sucks for username and password pasting. Again, no other app I use has this issue. Keyboard navigation through words, lines, begin of line, end of line etc behaves wrong compared to other apps as well. The Removal of control click to copy a html url in spam is strange, copying email addresses out of a email takes a secret click and drag to select the word. These are two issues that were a non issue pre 2004, and we have had a few dot releases, they should have been addressed. Ok, I have moved into a rant, sorry. (I wont even touch on Exchange server :-)) However, the point is, there are literally tons of these little issues I can point out, that would be hard to debate as being "works as intended" issues. Microsoft does not put me in a position to take the time to document them and report them, as there is no assurance that they are listening. I am not asking to be paid to make their very own product better, but acknowledgment that they are using my time to their advantage is something I would need to want to get into putting forth the effort. So, please, if you can, open up a little, put up a public bug tracker, or even a private one if that is how it has to be. If you can not do that, give a dev the authority to comment publicly in this list, or a private one. Throw us a bone, I think the feedback you get will make it worth your while, and in the end, it sells more copies and helps more end users to have a better tool. Thanks for taking the time to hear me out. -- ------------------------------------------------------------- Scott Haneda Tel: 415.898.2602 <http://www.newgeo.com> Novato, CA U.S.A. -- To unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.letterrip.com/> old-archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/entourage-talk%40lists.boingo.com/>
