On 12/ott/06, at 18:21, Jeffrey Martin wrote:
I really hope that a new release will come as soon as possible. The
current version RB 2006 R4 has broken ALL of my open projects for
one reason or various.
Stating on what I read on this list and on my personal experience, I
think there are a lot of people in stuck with RB for some reason.
Including me.
The main problem, as usual, is the fact that every new release fixes
some bugs and introduce new ones. Sometimes, I suspect, fixing a bug
expose the new bugs, sometimes the new bugs are related to new
features and some other times the new features break the existing ones.
This is a cat biting his tail.
I currently have 4 releases of REALbasic on my hard disk and I have
to choose for every project which of them is better for that
particular project. Perhaps I should say which of them is less
worst... Sadly, I often end to use RB 5.5.5 which, IMHO, is the most
stable and productive release ever.
This also prevent me to use some new language extensions and
With the release of 2006r4 we finally have Universal Binary. This
mean we currently have no chances: people want Universal
applications. It doesn't have any importance the fact that, for most
applications, using a PowerPC version under Rosetta emulation is
enough. This is a marketing related issue, not technical.
The fact RS respected the rapid release schedule it's a matter of
marketing, too. They simply release *what they have* at the
predefined date (more or less).
The rapid release model could be a good choice, starting from a solid
base, but not with RB 2006. At least RS should stop to add new
features and focus the efforts in fixing bug. I'd really appreciate a
release without [New] tags in the Release Notes, and I'm sure many
other people too.
Another hot topic, at least for me, is the fact we are not only
customers of RS, but full time beta-testers too. Testing and bug
reporting should be something volunteer (and it is) but the actual
situation turned to be "if you want a bug fixed, then file a bug
report". Ok, I understand that if the guys at RS are not informed of
an existing bug, they can't fix it. But why we (users) find bugs and
RS doesn't? Too often, reported bugs are indeed, stupid bugs.
Everyone which extensively use RB can recognize them. But the fact
is, sadly, RS doesn't take seriously bug reports. Just for example I
filed a bug report regarding the fact that when something goes wrong
in the 2006r4 IDE and show the "An error occurred...blah blah"
window, it also include the exceptions stack. This often cause the
dialog box to go off-screen and prevent me to press the "Continue"
button. The RS evaluation for this bug was "please provide a sample
project".
This makes me think if they read the bug reports or not... How is
supposed I can provide a sample project that programatically crash
the IDE?
Anyway, I really think RS has a very good base of aficionados. We are
here discussing about bugs, how to solve them, finding workaround,
filing bug reports, testing beta releases. Really, we should discuss
of other things, but the fact is we simply can't. We are too
concerned in solving bugs.
The fact in this list there are so many messages regarding broken
features of RB, it's the mirror of the actual situation.
So we are now some sort of venture capital for RS.
We do buy update plans to have the ability to partecipate to beta
testing and support the REALbasic development. Hoping to see, a day,
the result of this effort.
The RAD myth is gone together with other nice words like
"productivity", "ease of use", "really working"... and my money for
the next update plan.
Thank you.
Massimo Valle
Chiacchiera con i tuoi amici in tempo reale!
http://it.yahoo.com/mail_it/foot/*http://it.messenger.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode:
<http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/>
Search the archives of this list here:
<http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
