Product Improvements Complaints!

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gvonpickartz
Posts: 26
Last visit: Tue Mar 05, 2024 1:17 am

Product Improvements Complaints!

Post by gvonpickartz »

Product, version and build: 5.2.128
32 or 64 bit version of product: 64
Operating system: Windows 7
32 or 64 bit OS: 64
PowerShell Version: 5.0

Complaints:
1] The license information is black text on dark grey. Its nearly unreadable and probably not even allowed even by US laws, let alone EU.
2] There was no notification that existing FORM projects would be upgraded that are no longer backward compatible with older versions of 5.2.121.

Improvements needed:
1] Insert a balloon notice when switching away from STA mode (from enable to disabled state) that it would adversely affect the multi threaded abilities of your form such as "load/save" dialogues not working or text boxes using system predictive directory (suggest & append) options.
2] The auto-download and install feature does not work since 5.2.121.
User avatar
Alexander Riedel
Posts: 8478
Last visit: Tue Mar 26, 2024 8:52 am
Answers: 19
Been upvoted: 37 times

Re: Product Improvements Complaints!

Post by Alexander Riedel »

"The license information is black text on dark grey. Its nearly unreadable and probably not even allowed even by US laws, let alone EU. "
Can you provide a screen shot? I am not sure what you mean by "license information". You mean the EULA?

"There was no notification that existing FORM projects would be upgraded that are no longer backward compatible with older versions of 5.2.121."
Newer file format versions usually happen for a reason. Since you have the new version, why do you have a problem with it?

As for your other topics:
We will not put up "Are you sure?" message boxes fro any changes a user makes to options. Since it is easy enough to switch that option back on, it should not be an issue. Is the problem rooted in not knowing what STA is or does?
"The auto-download and install feature does not work since 5.2.121.": "Does not work" is too global. Can you be more specific? It does not start?
Alexander Riedel
SAPIEN Technologies, Inc.
User avatar
gvonpickartz
Posts: 26
Last visit: Tue Mar 05, 2024 1:17 am

Re: Product Improvements Complaints!

Post by gvonpickartz »

Hi,

1] the EULA info was indeed dark grey background with black text.
2] Newer file formats... indeed, it would be nice to know they are going to affect a given project, that you therefore cannot use older versions of Sapien Studio for this reason. (too troubleshoot or investigate issues between versions studio or is it the code etc?)...
3] Single Threaded Apartment; A reminder of the impact to GUI forms could be useful, for said reasons.
4] the auto-download does start, it even reminds me there is an update, I run, click the download and install button, and it briefly starts something, then closes out completely without notice or error. Nothing downloaded. It used to work in the past via my corporate proxy.


As for the tone in response... you may not like that I put a complaint up here, but be thankful that customers do put out the effort to complain, its the visible part of the ice-berg as a problem. The invisible and or silent complainers that say nothing and walk away is the body of the iceberg.

As for me, I am getting a bit tired of bug challenges that affect my productivity and or office mood. I wont go down on a rant on how really feel. Still holding out hope and will renew my subscription soon...

- Captain! Ice-berg ahead! {says enough for any business...}
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Alexander Riedel
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Last visit: Tue Mar 26, 2024 8:52 am
Answers: 19
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Re: Product Improvements Complaints!

Post by Alexander Riedel »

I apologize if you took my attempt to be brief for any kind of emotional reaction. I was simply trying to be brief and efficient.
Having said that, I will try to be more verbose.

1. I verified this and filed a bug report. As far as I know it is supposed to be black on white, but the installer vendor sometimes also changes things without telling us.
2. There really is no good place to do that to be honest. Prompting you after the new version was installed and you try to open an "old" project file will annoy you, since it will potentially make you back out everything.
Putting it in the log file should happen, but we are aware that many users only read this after they encounter an issue. I will discuss with the team what possible options are available. As we only do this rarely and only for very good reasons
this should not affect you very often. But I hope you understand that we cannot hold back necessary changes to file formats because one or the other user does not want to update.
3. I will keep that for the end....
4. If the update tool starts (it does not download any updates automatically) and shows you a list of changes it means that it can connect to the server and get the new configuration file. That implies the tool is not blocked or prevented from
accessing the internet. As there is no error message, it most likely thinks it downloaded everything and all is a-ok. Most commonly this occurs if you run software on your machine, gateway, proxy etc that prevents downloading executable files.
Unfortunately we cannot examine your network from here. But if you have any additional information on how your network is configured, please do post it here. In the meantime, you can ALWAYS get the latest build from your SAPIEN account page.
We used a Win32 API call for downloading previously, but since that is blocked on MANY systems, we had to replace that. It is entirely possible that this is the one thing that worked on your system


Now back to 3.

Popping up a message box to warn a user about something he or she does not understand is not useful. Popping up a message box to make a user verify to do what he just told the software to do is, well, annoying :D Modern user interface design principles teach that you should avoid message boxes like the plague. I am going into great detail here because people lurking here design GUIs, so this may help.
I have asked if you switched off STA not knowing what it is. The reason I asked this two fold. For one, if you just turned it off to see if we prompt you, well, not much I can do about that. Hit that iceberg then, full ahead :D
Secondly, if you did not know what it was, I have to ask why you turned that know without knowing what it is. I am not trying to imply anything, I simply would like to know what the thought process was. This will help us decide what to do with this.
We can simply take the option away, we can make the tooltip more verbose or we can hide the option in a place where it is only available to those who really need to flip that bit.

So why not simply popping up a message box you ask? Because it is not helpful.

1. Most users, and this has been proven over and over, press OK on any popup as a reflex. If you ask them why they pushed it, they tend to not know. You may be different, I do not know you, but ask anyone who wrote applications for Windows 3.x where these dialogs have been a constant source of, um, discussion.
2. Prompting the user to acknowledge the change he just made does not help someone understand what they did. Alan Cooper (GUI design book: The inmates are running the asylum) calls this the "Acknowledge you are stupid" dialog or something along those lines. No offense intended.
3. Let's say we really try to make the popup helpful. "Turning off this option will result in your script not working if you use one of the following: etc etc ad nauseam" If you do not use any of these features AT THIS MOMENT you will still say yes. Three months later when you add the file open dialog you will not remember this question (most will just have pressed ok without reading it)
4. In the meantime this dialog will drive anyone crazy who toggles that bit regularly for a reason. Why does this always ask me to verify what I just told it to do?
5. Last but not least, if we add one here, you will come back and say: You added a dialog here, now add one there too. :D We do not want that.

I hope this makes it more clear and did not darken your office mood too much :D
Alexander Riedel
SAPIEN Technologies, Inc.
User avatar
gvonpickartz
Posts: 26
Last visit: Tue Mar 05, 2024 1:17 am

Re: Product Improvements Complaints!

Post by gvonpickartz »

[quote="Alexander Riedel"]

1. Thanks, good that a bug-report is filed.
2. Visual Studio Prompts a user with a notice upon opening an older format project resource, notifying them of the one-way upgrade. This is what i expect to see or be informed off. Regardless if inmates run the asylum etc, its important enough to know this can effect GUI projects. I do use version control (TortoiseSVN) to help mitigate the risk. An early notice is welcome to create a branch or dedicate a version into the SVN store for this change. Now this change sneaked in my SVN store without me having the option to "rubber-stamp" version so to speak...

3. I will keep that for the end....

4. The file is indeed visible and advertised as you mentioned. I am able to download the new versions thru my store account. However, when I use the download and install button option, this disappears. Is there a trace tool or log file to upload? I do know we are using a new proxy device (cannot reveal vendor name for corp. legal reasons.) This might be the caveat here. But as mentioned, the file is listed, thus it does see the package changes...


Now back to 3.

I cant recall if I accidentally or deliberately unchecked the STA mode to investigate options within threading and executing internal process within my GUI form. All I know it took me down a rabbit hole of trying to figure out the next day why my form was not behaving as expected after the upgrade the following day. Thus, I went up and down the version history of sapien products... it lead to above said discoveries of EULA lic; GUI upgraded projects files etc and auto update features... You can imagine that I was getting annoyed believing the latest build kept introducing even bigger bugs! meanwhile it was the STA mode. So, I am back on the latest version as I am thankfully happy it auto-signs my PS 5.0 x64 projects as it did not do so in previous release etc.

As for installing Sapien PowerShell Studio... Here is a cool tidbit to unpin defunct taskbar items (in user context only). Why not use PowerShell to Un-pin the Old Shortcut from the taskbar?

Code: [Select all] [Expand/Collapse] [Download] (UnPin-ItemFromTaskBar.ps1)
  1. #
  2. FUNCTION UnPin-ItemFromTaskBar ([String]$Path, [String]$Filenames)
  3. {
  4.      "- FUNCTION Start: [UnPin-ItemFromTaskBar] with options {Ver: $Path Binaries: $Filenames}"
  5.     FOREACH ($_ IN $Filenames)
  6.     {
  7.         $CurrentFile = $_
  8.         IF (Test-Path -Path "$Path\$CurrentFile")
  9.         {
  10.              "- Removing Pinned Item: $CurrentFile"
  11.             $shell = new-object -com "Shell.Application"
  12.             $folder = $shell.Namespace("$Path")
  13.             $item = $folder.Parsename("$CurrentFile")
  14.             $TaskBar = $item.Verbs() | ? { $_.Name -eq 'Unpin from Tas&kbar' }
  15.             if ($TaskBar) { $TaskBar.DoIt() }
  16.             $StartMenu = $item.Verbs() | ? { $_.Name -eq 'Unpin from Start Men&u' }
  17.             if ($StartMenu) { $StartMenu.DoIt() }
  18.         }
  19.         ELSE
  20.         {
  21.              "- Pinned Item not found."
  22.         }
  23.     }
  24.      "- FUNCTION Exit: [UnPin-ItemFromTaskBar]."
  25.      "-"
  26. }
use as follows:
UnPin-ItemFromTaskBar -Path "C:\Program Files\SAPIEN Technologies, Inc\PowerShell Studio 2016\" -Filenames "PowerShell Studio.exe"
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