The best 330 MB of my C: drive...

Well, I hate to be negative about stuff, I really do, but I just can't help it. Having fought so many times with a lacking help system, I finally decided it was time to uninstall it. It's pretty useless to me as if I want MS docs I'll search for them on the net and they will be more up to date. So, I finally decided to go to Add-Remove Programs and Change the Rad Studio installation to remove those help files.

In doing so, I found out a few more things:

1. Install-aware sucks even more than I thought! What used to be a few seconds on a decent installer takes over 6 minutes to do in this Install-Aware setup!
2. They use a lot of progress bars but really show no progress: a blinking light would show the same information... At one point 2 were present at once and really I could be no closer or farther away from knowing how much more time I'd have to wait as they were file-based progress bars and not *process* based ones...
3. What the heck is a "Cach"? As in "Removing Cach folder xxx"
4. Shouldn't I get a more graceful message when pressing F1 on RAD Studio if I chose to remove the help files? (in a legitimate way and not hacking the files!)
   And the message even shows in Portuguese even though my Windows and RAD Studio are both English...
   
5. Finally, if I chose to remove the cached install files, what are 100 MB left there for?

This is all a nasty combo of a lousy installer with probably some lousy install scripts...

Q: Would I uninstall Delphi 2007?

A: Well, I've got used to it and it works well overall so most likely no, I'll keep using it. I just got fed up with the so labeled "Improved Help"... Pitty that MSFT set the road that others followed by releasing unfinished software...

For those who may not like me "bitching" about this: would you like to buy a car that "sort of works"? And that has to go through a few Service Packs before you really got what you're promised it would be before purchasing? I'm just applying the same principle to Software...

[EDIT: I've just "fixed" that error message: removed the htmlhelp2100.bpl (or something like that) from the known IDE packages so now pressing F1 silently fails. I'll probably try and find some replacement help files/reader as I vaguely remember something about using previous versions help files. Then I'll try downloading those help files from the customer area if it works! :)]

CodeGear Replays: not entirely their fault... :)

Well, after my previous post, and after some comment left in by a reader, I decided to "bug" Anders (not knowing he's on vacation!), and it appears that the problem with the video not skipping to where you try to skip is Camtasia's fault... Having tried Camtasia in the past, and seeing how many "helper" files it generates and all of them including the video duration, I would expect it to be able to do something as simple as positioning the video cursor somewhere where the video has already streamed (you can tell by the bar color, gradually filling with a lighter gray where it has already streamed).

It appears that instead, you have to wait until the whole video has finished streaming before you can reliably position the video playback cursor somewhere! I just browsed some of their own videos and noticed that they too suffer from the same problem so it does not look like it's CodeGear to blame on this one! :)

On the plus side, Anders also said he might be looking at making the download links available after returning from his vacation next week...

For now, you can start the playback of any video, pause it (if you don't want to be listening to it while it streams), and when the progress bar has completely filled light gray, you can then position the playback cursor wherever you want and use that as a quick way to skip past content that you want to, well, skip! :)