I always have a list going. Here are the ones off the top of my head in no particular order:
HTMLViewer: It’s a buggy control at best. It doesn’t work the same across platforms. I want to use it exactly like I use the Webbrowser control in Visual Basic and I suspect that most people do as well.
StyledText reading of RTF in Mac OS X: Seth, BKeeney Software employee #3, wrote up an excellent post on why StyledText is pretty much useless for Mac OS X users.
Reporting Tool: This is the very first feedback report I signed up on when I first learned about the old Feedback Reports. You can’t do that anymore with FogBugz but the fact remains that without a good reporting tool, sanctioned by Real Software, it’s a major hindrance. Now, to be fair, On Target Reports is good enough for a lot of people and it’s relatively inexpensive price makes it worthy of trying out in most projects. I also haven’t used it since they updated it. I still suspect that it’s missing some features that Active Reports and Crystal Reports have had for years such as capturing runtime events and passing it back to the application. An example of this would be an accounting Balance Sheet report and the user double clicks on a particular account and a second, more detailed report is generated.
COM Support: I could sell a lot more clients on going to RB if it had full COM support. Some of my clients have invested years and a lot of money in specialized ActiveX controls and using the generic RB controls is a major step backwards for them in terms of functionality. Having full COM support let’s them get to RB in the first place and THEN we can worry (long term) about replacement controls if they want to go cross-platform.
Composite Windows/Cocoa: They’re working on Cocoa – I know that. When it will be released is anyone’s guess. Until then, using composite windows is pretty much broken so, what do you do? When you need composite windows you need them.
Lack of standard GUI controls: TreeView, grids, date/time pickers, calendars, etc. Yes, I already have the Einhugur controls and use them all the time. The recent issues with 2008 R3 and the Einhugur plugins clearly demonstrates why a 3rd party control is risky. Even Microsoft ships the basic controls that I mentioned. Okay, MS’ versions are crappy for the most part, but for a majority of users they’re good enough and hence why there’s a market for enhanced controls. I think most people are disappointed that they spend money on RB and then feel forced to go to Einhugur for additional controls.
Those are my big ones. I’m sure if I thought about it for a while longer I’d remember more. What are yours?
For years when I went to the gym I would take a book along and while on whatever middle-aged torture device (i.e. aerobic machines) and read. Since I’m an avid reader it was sort of cool but since books vary in size (think paperback vs. hardback) and in typeface size it wasn’t always practical (and finding one of the plastic trays to hold a book was sometimes a problem as well). Plus, getting sweat in the pages and breaking the bindings were not favorable to the health of the books either.
With the advent of the iPod I had even less incentive to take a book to the gym. Unfortunately, having very little space on my iPhone left me in a quandry because I absolutely hate to watch the televisions at the gym and be forced to read the subtitles (if they happened to be on) and since the iPhone doesn’t have a FM receiver I couldn’t listen to it anyway. Oh heck, I hate television so it’s no great loss. The problem is that my motivation for staying on the turture devices was, shall we say, lacking.
All that is over now. In fact, I may be over-doing the torture machines now. Why? It’s simple really. The eReader fits on the tiny ledge of the machines that wouldn’t hold a regular book and I can jack the typeface up to it’s largest size so that I don’t get eyestrain while moving all around.
So 20 minutes is no longer an issue. Heck, I did 60 the other day and was pissed that I didn’t finish the chapter. I guess I can’t complain if I’m exercising my imagination and my body at the same time. It’s been the first time in years that I look forward to the gym so I can read. Amazing how odd life can be sometimes.
Release 3.1 (seems odd to say that, doesn’t it?) doesn’t fix that many bugs (about 15), but it’s significant in that it’s the first time I can remember a ‘dot’ release in the era of the Rapid Release Model (RRM). It certainly addresses one of the biggest problems with the RRM: What happens when the release has new bugs not in previous releases? Do I have to wait 90 days to get it addressed?
I know there are many developers that have stuck with an older release simply because of bugs introduced with a newer version. I was bitten by this problem in 2008 R2 where the error handling in Windows didn’t catch Nil Object Exceptions but because we were using one of the R2 introspection features we couldn’t revert. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. Thankfully R3 was released sooner than the 90 days. (Also, truth be told, it forced us to be very careful with code since it couldn’t be caught.)
From what I can tell, the only really big bug addressed with this release has something to do with the Einhugur plugin controls. Strangely enough, that’s not in the release notes but I believe it was in the press release. Go figure. Other than that, most of the bugs fixed something new to this release and only a few seemed fairly serious.
Anyway, I’m pretty happy that Real decided to do an updated release. I hope that this is more than an experiment (or an emergency) and they ‘plan’ for dot releases in the future. I say ‘plan’ because no one wants to issue another release if they don’t have to. But RB is a very large project and the Law of Unintended Consequences can certainly bite when you think you’re changing something minor. **it happens sometimes.
The dot release also tells me that RS wants every release to be useable. A good goal in my opinion and should alleviate a lot of the complaining about the Rapid Release Model.
What are your thoughts?
As a user, a disabled menu item tells me something: I haven’t selected whatever object I need to perform this command. It seems idiotic that I’d want a messagebox popping up AFTER I selected the menu telling me that I didn’t have whatever selected. Talk about confusing.
The Daring Fireball response is perfect.
Though, I dare say that there is a point to Mr. Spolsky’s observation. There does need to be some way to let users know why a menu item is disabled. Oh, it seems that Apple had thought of this already way back when with Balloon Help. (Link from Daring Fireball).
Another excellent response to the original premise by Lukas Mathias here. Lukas suggests using tooltips to aid users. (Link from Daring Fireball).
Thoughts? Is Joel right or is he treating the user like they’re a friggin’ idiot when they don’t need to be?
Among the new features in release 3 is code profiling (pro version only). Profiling lets you see where your code is spending its time. It’s very handy and is a most welcome addition.
The compiler now supports Attributes which allows you to do some fun stuff with compile-time metadata. You can see Aaron’s blog for more info on attributes.
They’ve enhanced the check project/item to provide feedback about problem areas. In particular you’ll now get warnings about code that is deprecated. This was one of my wish list items: compiler warnings.
You can have constants and enums inside of classes now as well. There’s also the usual mix of bug fixes and stability improvements – especially in the Windows builds.
The only issue I know of is with Einhugur plugins. The IDE will now complain that they’re using the old style constructors (the class name) but thankfully RB can do a temporary fix until the plugins are updated. There’s also an issue with the Einhugur plugins not getting keydown events. Fogbugz entry here. This appears to be a Mac only problem but the Fogbugz entry hasn’t been updated yet.
So all-in-all I think this was a pretty good release. Even the documentation is updated with the new attributes information. Only time will tell, but for now I give RS kudo’s for doing a good job.