Hi Matt, I've replied inline to your comments:
On Jun 11, 7:18 am, Matt Kruse <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jun 11, 2:55 am, String <[email protected]> wrote: > > > There's a real feeling of abandonment on the forum, that Google has > > broken our gadgets in the production environment - with no warning > > before the fact, and next-to-no feedback from official channels after > > the fact. > > Indeed, it is extremely frustrating. But this has been the pattern of > iGoogle development all along, I guess it's just how it works. > > It seems like these things are so badly planned. Some points: > > 1) Some warning of big changes like this would be nice. Even just a > post in here. Yes, I would have liked to provide notice, too, but the timing was unfortunate while I was out of the office. > 2) Give developers the chance to opt-in to a beta testing program with > their gadgets first! A piecemeal way to do this for things like gadgets.* (which require container-specific tweaks) would be very difficult. As I mention, I suspect a lot of these problems aren't part of the new rendering code, just other types of breakages which coincided with this other release. The sandbox provided an opt-in way to test existing gadgets without disrupting users. > 3) Seemingly applying the new rendering code at random is the worst > idea! Half my gadgets break, half don't. Some break for me, but not > others. I have no way of knowing why, because I didn't even know that > the v2 was in place. I can't change my gadget code because not every > user is seeing the v2 changes. This kind of random roll-out of changes > just seems terrible. You should be able to identify problems caused by the gadgets.* rollout by using the sandbox. In addition to that, there should be _IG_/gadgets.* compatible ways of fixing problems that crop up that won't strand any of your users. > 4) When you break functionality, please fix it ASAP! Do you know that > us developers start getting emails from annoyed users when you break > our gadgets in production? It's such a hassle. It takes time away from > me. That's the goal, but it was probably delayed somewhat because I was away. > 5) Please do better testing. I can't believe that simple functionality > like _toggle() was broken. I don't have statistics, but I expect the number of people using _toggle is small. We did compatibility testing on many popular gadgets, and I personally emailed a number of developers when we encountered something that would require a change on their end. Breaking _toggle is a failure on our part, but it's a small one. > 7) When problems are pointed out, please give us the chance to revert > gadgets back to the old renderer, rather than just continuing to have > a broken gadgets for days or weeks. The purpose of the experiment is specifically to identify these types of problems while they only affect a small number of users. If problems are noted (that outweigh the benefits of the new system) a rollback can, and sometimes does, occur. In this case, the problems were either small enough (in quantity, magnitude of effect, or both), or the benefits outweighed these problems. It's also possible that because I wasn't here, the problems were not as visible to the product team, and therefore they continued anyway. > 8) For some of us, iGoogle is the hub of our information feed from the > web. When it breaks, it's quite frustrating. When we continue to see > things change and our stuff broken, it's a sign that maybe we're > depending too much on a fragile technology. iGoogle feels more like a > playground than a platform. It's quite frustrating for everyone when it breaks, and the goal is to keep it from breaking. > 9) Without user-created gadgets, iGoogle would be useless. Please > respect your developers. We do! I think my temporary disappearance might have conveyed otherwise, sorry about that. > Hopefully future changes will be handled a little more smoothly. > > Matt Kruse --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iGoogle Developer Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Gadgets-API?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
