lajjal, I'm going to be very blunt right now. I don't want a flame war, I don't want a fight, but I
do want to correct several (damaging) statements you made. Hopefully we can have a peaceful & productive discussion.
lajjal wrote:As to Kidsafe, I am sorry to have ruffled their feathers but I still think they help make my point.
Disagreed. See the rest of my post.
lajjal wrote:So, in answer to computerfreaker, the fact that he is going AFK (whatever that is) is irrelevant.
AFK means "away from keyboard", which is where I
was until I heard rumblings that all was not well. So here I am again.
lajjal wrote:As I noted in my initial post, there are two advantages to being at the top of the list. One is a nefarious attempt to gain exposure and the other is a way to get your app debugged and expanded because the app has not been planned well or tested. Kidsafe falls into that catagory .
At least you've not tried accusing us of trying to abuse the site to gain exposure.
lajjal wrote:Their update log shows an app that was not thought through much at all when it was first posted, hence all the added features,
Part of that is correct.
KidSafe began as a 30-minute project to keep my little siblings from destroying my computer; as they began figuring out how to work around my simple fullscreen window (pressing the Start key, for example, re-shows the Taskbar), I began adding features to kill their workarounds (for example, by disabling the Start key and forcibly hiding the Taskbar). Eventually, KidSafe got enough features that I figured somebody else might use it; in my wildest dreams, I never expected the kind of reception KidSafe got. Others began requesting new features, and KidSafe grew from a simple fullscreen window (the very first, unreleased, version) to what you see today.
lajjal wrote:and the bug list shows not much testing on their part.
I can see where you're coming from on this one but you're still wrong.
My only computer is a laptop running XP Pro SP3 (32-bit), and many (perhaps even most) of the bugs have been discovered on Vista/7.
Sometimes I can't even reproduce a bug, and have to rely on other testers' reports to find & fix the problem. Problems with UAC are a perfect example of this, since XP has no UAC. Another problem - KidSafe only covering the first monitor of a multi-monitor setup - was almost as bad, since I only have a single monitor. Once again, it took a lot of feedback from my multi-monitor testers to fix the problem.
If you don't like the length of the changelog, I have two suggestions: #1 stop looking at it, or #2 help us test so we don't have to put out versions with unknown bugs. That way, we don't have to say things like "Fixed such-and-such bug (thanks to XXX for report)" because the bug will be been squashed before it ever sees the light of day.
btw, for the record, I have never released a version of KidSafe with a known bug aboard, and I'm quick to fix bugs that do make it out.
Also, if you take a second look at the changelog, you can see that KidSafe has gotten vastly more robust over the past month or two. Compare the 0.3X.0.0 changelog, for example, with that of 0.25.X.0; for example, 0.35.0.0 has one bugfix, while 0.25.4.0 and 0.25.5.0 had 3 fixes each.
There's been an average of one bugfix per release for the past several releases, and many of those bugfixes have been minor (one was a missing space in a label's caption).
That, at least to me, means people have run out of major/average bugs to report and are stuck looking for minor ones. There's a reason I'm comfortable signing off for a few weeks, and it's because I know I can leave without people getting BSOD's or the like as soon as I'm gone.
lajjal wrote:They left both tasks to this website's visitors.
IMHO, that's a cheap shot, and definitely uncalled for.
No, we haven't. Several of this website's members have contributed a great deal (special thanks to guinness, joby_toss, Onesimus Prime, and webfork!), but we
never left everything up to you guys.
Feature requests: hey, I was done with my personal feature list a couple of months ago. I add new features because the users ask for them, just like any decent developer would do. Given that I'm the one doing the hard part - taking an idea and putting it into a concrete form - I'd hardly call requesting new features a "task".
Bug reports: if you guys can find a bug, I fix it. I test what I'm able to, but I'm doing much of this "in the dark" since I have no access to Vista/7.
lajjal, you apparently feel like being a sort of "armchair quarterback" - you're not part of the development team and you don't know what goes on internally, but somehow you feel justified to yell about decisions you don't know the logic behind. The accusations you made about KidSafe's feature growth, for example, are a prime example. If you wish to continue, I'd appreciate it if you take it into PM.
lajjal wrote:They just put some code out there and then respond to whatever happens.
That's true for all programs. The devs write some code, make sure it works for them, then put it out for anyone to see & use. Feature requests come in, and the devs respond. Bug reports come in, and the devs respond.
Have a good weekend!
computerfreaker