Thanks, Malcolm!
Well, my great feedback is that I would really like for the premise AA
brings to be true...write once and deploy as web browser page, IOS app,
and Android app, as well as a Windows fat client. And, after spending
considerable time watching video, reading, and hands-on, I think the
power and ability is there, but this really reminds me of herding cats!
Some problems seem so obvious: the editing of code for events is done in
modal windows. So if you're writing/editing code in the click event of a
button, you have to close that window to go look for the name of an
object you want to reference. (Yes, I know there are popups that provide
suggestions all over the place, but so far I haven't gotten my head
wrapped around what those popups are providing.)
In general, the interface was obviously designed by someone intimately
familiar with the system over a period of time, but without a road map
or master plan. It just feels like 'this' was tacked on to 'that' which
used to be called 'those' and was added to 'them.' And all along the
way, they didn't bother to document anything.
In their defense, there are hundreds of hours of video, free for the
watching, but as I told the salesrep I spoke with, you can't keyword
search a video and you have to sit and pay attention to the entire thing
to get (maybe) what you were looking for. And, some of the videos were
made by people who obviously didn't receive any training in speaking
(every other word is "uhm").
Like you, I want this to work. That's why I wanted to ask some general
questions to determine if there is light at the end of this long dark
tunnel.
I did submit a pre-sales question email and, in what seems to be the
Alpha-way, it precipitated an online video/voice conference with myself,
a sales rep, and a technician. Kind of overkill considering that my
question was to confirm that their server software could be deployed
without a Windows Server license. So I tried to be supportive and asked
a few other Qs for clarification...
"Is Alpha Anywhere the successor to and based on (and therefore
inclusive of) Alpha 5?" Answer: Yes
"Does AA read and write natively to DBF files without corruption during
multi-user access?" Answer: Yes. A5 used DBF files as its main, native
format for data storage.
And I had a how-to question about passing data values from one object to
a memory variable, and the tech was very quick to provide the same
answer I had already found (but it threw an error message when I tried
it). After that the tech said he needed to get on another call and
excused himself. Turned out that my error was due to having started with
an example object and making changes that broke the design.
All in all, some odd choices for how to present their product, a premium
price, in my opinion, and a pretty steep hill to climb to overcome the
poor documentation. I did point out to the salesrep that the docs were
poor....in typical salesrep style he agreed completely and said that was
a very high priority to fix...in fact, they have hired someone to clear
it up.
One final item. As $2500/year is a bit steep for my needs, the salesrep
asked if I had a client that I could charge it off to. I said that my
clients pay all my bills, eventually. I'm not sure he got that. Then he
offered that if I wanted to pay for three years in advance, they would
consider it a license for life. In other words, $7500 now and nothing
ever again. But, that would not include any bug fix releases or
upgrades, ever. I would come back to any subsequent product release as a
new customer. While interesting, that just doesn't feel like a good
option to me, considering the newness of the HTML5 platform and rapid
change of mobile platforms.
Mike
Malcolm Greene wrote:
Hi Mike,
I've taken a look at AlphaFive from time to time based on customer
interest in this product.
You would think that with Dan Bricklin at the CTO helm this would be a
killer product, but I'm just not seeing it.
http://www.alphasoftware.com/people.asp
Like you I found the documentation disappointing and the underlying
VB-like language kludgey.
Would love to hear some great feedback - this is a product I really
wanted to like.
Malcolm
[excessive quoting removed by server]
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