On my Help Tests, I ran around some minor quirks and I decided to blog about them as well! (Whoa: 3 whole posts in one day? Don't worry, that's probably 3 more months without posting so you'll have enough time to recover!)
Don't get me wrong, these are minor quirks, but it's also the 4th release of Delphi 2007 for Win32 (Release, SP1, SP2, SP3), so these should have been caught and dealt with by now, unless the quality control processes are seriously flawed... And before someone else goes "Oh, but the product is VERY good if this is all you can say about it", let me just point out that, no, this is not all (I've placed over 40 QC reports back when I did care about doing it), these are just those that immediately jump on you seconds after you start using the product, which doesn't give a good idea about the overall product quality... First impressions usually take longer to disappear...
1) Even selecting "Just me", the shortcut for the RAD Studio Documentation is installed for All Users.
In all honesty, I can't say whether this is a bug from the default SP3 install or caused by the Help Update. In either case, it should have been child's play to both detect and fix this, so there's no real excuse for letting something as simple as this slip through...
2) Minor toolbar sizing errors:
3) Personality Icon not showing (it appears to show only when a project is loaded, which is a bit odd for a single personality product)
4) Help Improve Visual Studio. WHY? If you buy a Volvo, will you get a form to fill out and return to FORD about how pleased you are with their engine? It doesn't make sense and for a team of developers, it shouldn't be hard to determine what registry key is needed to stop that from showing. Creates a wrong impression, when one does NOT buy Visual Studio and instead opts for buying a CodeGear product and then sees that "Help Improve Visual Studio"!
5) What's with this dull launch screen? So much space and the only thing that changes is a couple lines at the bottom? I used to like the previous launch screen better. Maybe it gets "filled" when you have some optional dotNET "modules", but as it is, it's plain dull...
Like I said above, all minor quirks, but also all first wrong impressions with a product...
7 comments:
Ick! My original comment had ONE spelling mistake and now it looks all off.
Anyhow- the Ford / Volvo comment is a little misleading, as Ford in fact owns Volvo. Say GM and we're all clear :)
The "Help improve Visual Studio" dialog seems not to be that easy to handle; there is an option in the registry to turn it off, but CodeGear said that DExplore ignores it under certain circumstances when started for the first time.
This must be either a testing mistake or a bad move of Microsoft.
@Andrew: Yep, that was intentional but only because I knew what type of motors a Volvo would use other than their own! Still, I'd be very surprised if you'd see such a form on a Volvo, regardless how much or little Ford owns the Volvo car business...
I don't know enough about other car makers to know who makes engines for them! :)
@Moritz: One thing I learned in over 25 years of programming: The sky is the limit.
So, Dexplore ignores that under certain conditions? Sounds like a good case for VM testing! Determine what conditions are those and fake another set of conditions!
Yes, it's a minor thing, but it's at least weird, especially for someone who buys a CodeGear product instead of another one from MSFT and then sees that message pop up... It's not like it's saying "Help Improve DExplore!". It says, incorrectly, "Help Improve Visual Studio", which is HIGHLY misleading...
Ford / Volvo / GM....
What we're talking about here is more akin to "platform sharing" than subsidiarity.
So a better example would be... buy a Ford Galaxy and get a form to send back to Volkswagen (the Ford Galaxy being derived from the VW Sharran).
But nit picky details aside I think the point was pretty clear already and anyway.
:)
Agreed, I've always said the Delphi is an amazing product with a horrible UI designed by Unix trolls that think this whole "GUI" thing is just a silly trend.
I'm conflicted about the splash/loading screen. I prefer the style of the new one but I don't like all the white space. I've always hated the old ones, every one of them felt a decade behind in style and never had that clean, crisp modern feel. The new one does except it's offset by it being so huge.
It's a say thing really, I still think Delph is the best tool for developing Win32 apps, it's just the UI fit-n-finish isn't there and they seem to be cursed by installers that have a high degree of suck.
The white space in the splash startup is used to show various 3rd party components that are loaded. For example, Raize Components will show here, as will the Castilla IDE enhancement. Only some 3rd party components seem to support this. Developer Express didn't show up in the startup list, for example. I'm not sure it's really worth all of the white space, but it is kind of nice to see what major addons are being loaded without having to pay attention to the specific filenames along the bottom.
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