Is it just me...

[george]

...or do Actinic seem to have gone backwards since the launch v9?

[acompton]

Backwards in what way?
- bug levels
- support
- only accepting payment in shekels?

[george]

Just the whole package really. v9 wasnt the release that many predicted or even expected in my opinion. (the main bit being moto that didnt work properly for many... duh)

Not much being said about v10, well, nothing public anyway.

Some long term Actinic users now looking elsewhere.

Actinic lose some important staff members.

Just the general vibe I get thats all.

[leehack]

I understand what you mean George, it's probably just a perception though because the main selling points (as I see them) have all had problems in V9. When the best features have all had problems, I think your mind naturally overshadows things and goes back to the last version and compares. A fully functioning V9 is a good step forward in Actinic terms IMO.

The PR is the main problem - as we had with V8 also. The problems always seem to overshadow the new features. That's a shame, cos they switch you off to a version prematurely. I myself want V10 now, i'm done with V9, it has taken too long to get it working right IMO. There needs to be a wow factor soon and what we call a wow. We all need a lift, things seem seem pretty unhappy and a bit lack lustre at the moment. Negative vibe is around for sure, it will settle down i guess as most things do.

[pinbrook]

given al lthe cr** we've taken with v8 and 9 i'd like to see a bug free version of 9 before we even consider 10. The trouble is the more complex actinic becomes the buggier it will be.

Oh and if i stay in fantasyland i'd like all the new features promised for 10 to be incorporated into 9 as i am fed up with the constant upgrading.

Lets vote for more user testing on EVERY release for the foreseeable future (and less patches).

Personally i'm giving v9 a miss and returning to my policy of alternate versions for my preferred upgrade path (or even every 3rd as v7 seems to still be live and kicking)

[leehack]

Personally i'm giving v9 a miss and returning to my policy of alternate versions for my preferred upgrade path (or even every 3rd as v7 seems to still be live and kicking)
I never used to agree with you on this, but I think I might do now. You have to be bonkers to jump in at first release nowadays, however if noone jumps in, then the problems will not be found as soon or as often, so the whole process gets drawn out anyway. The pioneers (aka guinea pigs) are needed in the process, pay the guinea pigs i say. If noone jumps in when first released, look at the release to be a year old before you can jump in, that far down the line you can make an argument for waiting for the next version. Viscious circle.

[Steve G Griggs]

Back to the idea of live testing in the real world, to actually USE the new releases in a real business environment.
I'm not sure you would get many guinea pigs tho' -who could (or would) afford to run a business that way with lost time to bugs and waiting for tech support to fix bugs (and consequent loss of orders & business).
Personally I really cant see an easy way out apart from a team of people employed as testers who are computer literate, but not Actinic staff who try to run dummy shops, and act as dummy shoppers- but then as Actinic customers we would (obviously) have to pay for that in the long run.

[pinbrook]

I never used to agree with you on this, but I think I might do now. You have to be bonkers to jump in at first release nowadays, however if noone jumps in, then the problems will not be found as soon or as often, so the whole process gets drawn out anyway. The pioneers (aka guinea pigs) are needed in the process, pay the guinea pigs i say. If noone jumps in when first released, look at the release to be a year old before you can jump in, that far down the line you can make an argument for waiting for the next version. Viscious circle.Yup agreed, but you can separate upgrades and new sites.

Often a new site can be developed in a new version sucessfully. I'm striving for utopia where more stuff comes to light during testing, thus reducing this painful period where fee paying customers get to be unwitting unpaid guinea pigs.

I've bee nsayingthe same thing since v8 - the software needs more rigourous testing in the field before its released

[animal dreams]

More testing is defintiely required and not by the software developers (or people too close to them) because they always test how they designed it rather than how others expect to use it in my experience.

I deliberately waited for release 3 of V9 thinking that most of the bugs would be ironed out. Not the case! Introducing new functionality late into a software cycle is asking for problems. Adding new functionality increases the testing cycle so the quick fixes required for significant bugs gets extended to the point where customers are full of frustration and the increasing pressure on the development team to get the release out leads to inevitable short cuts. IMO waiting 7-8 months to get fixes for some signficant issues is unacceptable.

Actinic is in the difficult position of being behind on functionality in some areas, but most of all now it needs a stable product which delivers on the promised functional spec. Don't give us more poorly tested functionality and expect us to keep waiting and paying. PLEASE!!!

[pnagames]

i was excited when actinic hosted the user event a few months back. it promised a new way forward and a drastic improvement from actinic in terms of communications.

i havent seen that drastic improvement.

Actinic really need to sort out themselves. Staff leave all the time (its the normal these days). this cannot be an excuse for anything.

one of the most succesfull gaming companies that i have ever seen (and i doubt that i will see a more succesfull company) interacts with the customers very often, has a huge forum, 99% of their staff are seen on the forum participating in discussion or explaining why things are in one way and not the other, listens to customers requests for new features (not necesarily all of them will make it to the next version) etc...

the result of this is them having the uk no1 pc game during the christmas selling period for the last 5-6 years easily (it usually stays no1 for at least 5 weeks as well). and this is besides their success in many other countries across the globe

i would love actinic to try and emulate them

[cbarling]

There's always a difficult balance between conflicting demands.

We looked at v9 and felt that the upload was unacceptably slow for too many people. So we made the massive change to sort out this one problem, but the changes did introduce some additional issues.

It was a development to an existing release, provided free of charge. You could argue (and some did inside Actinic) that we should have put this into v10. However, if we had, some people would have vehemently argued that they shouldn't need to pay to sort out an existing problem. There's always some people happy and some not so, whichever line you take.

v9.0.3 sorted out a lot of problems, but left some others not solved. It also introduced some very irritating crashes. v9.0.4 is a much smaller piece of work, with the focus being 90-95% of the effort on pure bug fixing (the rest was putting The Third Man into Actinic Payments). While it won't sort out everything, I think that it will feel like a massive improvement as a lot of commonly experienced bugs are fixed.

Please volunteer to beta test it, this will really help to move things forward.

Beta testing isn't a substitute for internal testing and other field testing that we will be arranging, hopefully with some of the people who have commented in this thread. But it is still a big help.

Chris

[cbarling]

With respect to communications, we have two of Actinic's three directors (Ben Dyer and myself) moderately active on the forum. We've started a monthly posting on developments in Actinic News. We've held one face to face general user event and promised another this year.

Of course, there's always more that can be done, so I guess we need to keep working at this?

With respect to staff turnover, I agree that there is always turnover, and it's no excuse. Some of our changes, including Ben's arrival, have been to try to address issues. I can see these changes having a positive impact, and I expect that to continue.

Chris

[Goz]

Sorry Chris - what is Actinic News?

[NRasool]

Sorry Chris - what is Actinic News?

Hey Goz, its http://community.actinic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=26, but there is only 1 posting in there which is March, and think you have already seen it :)

[JGLIGHTING]

Here is the link to Actinic News (http://community.actinic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=26)

[chris ashdown]

What about a complete rethink of the whole update process, all are done by downloading so no extra delivery costs to Actinic

I suggest the actinic picks the top 6 bugs and then the forum gives them a rating from one to six

Actinic then solves bugs one and two and releases a V0.0.X, then three and four etc

No need for new features of any kind after initial release, keep them for next version, No need for big multifix testing as small fixes easy to check and test and also keeps most users happy

Keep it simple, why release 20-90 bug fixes in one go it only leads to delays and new bugs that are harder to trace

[Goz]

Actinic News - :o - I should have remembered.

My excuse is it has only happened the once so far and I need repetitive things to stick in my brain. Must be getting old!

[cbarling]

Chris, the process around maintenance releases is something we think about a lot. When there aren't too many bugs around, it works pretty well. When there are lots, every process including our current one, suffers.

Pros of frequent small maintenance releases: can fix ultra critical problems very fast, each release represents lower risk; cons are that some people, especially web designers with multiple clients, don't want frequent releases

Pros of current system: can fairly comprehensively and end to end test the product (not possible for many small releases), less effort on the release cycle (documentation, QA, announcements etc); cons are that releases are bigger and riskier and we have to wait for fixes.

In practise we copmbine the apporoaches - we do put out a small emergency release if a new maintenance release has introduced a truly disastrous problem.

Chris

[parklifeclothes]

we do put out a small emergency release if a new maintenance release has introduced a truly disastrous problem.

Chris

So why has no fix been made for the empty snapshot problem that has been around for a considerable time and that I now suffer, personally I would quote this as a 'truly disastrous problem':confused:

[Duncan Rounding]

...especially web designers with multiple clients, don't want frequent releases...

Very true, but primarily because the incremental versions can't coexist and all sites have to be upgraded which can get complex when you are supporting many clients on differing releases.

[pinbrook]

on the whole my vote goes for fewer but bigger releases to sort out bugs - of course i wish the bugs were diminishing rather than increasing, buggy software is a nightmare and such a waste of a developers time.

I'm all for small emergency releases for show stoppers, but these should then be integrated into the next big release.


We looked at v9 and felt that the upload was unacceptably slow for too many people. So we made the massive change to sort out this one problem, but the changes did introduce some additional issues.
Chris

The biggest disapointment for me is the compression which only works out of the box on a small subset of server configurations (it requires host intervention to make it work)- with no timescale for rolling it out to cover the majority of servers, not everyone has a friendly host :)

[leehack]

The smaller the releases the more duplicate work you do when testing etc. so I can see the point. It's hard to balance and get it right, you never know if you got it right until after each release i'd imagine.

I think things lean slightly towards too many things being done at once at the moment. I'd like to see maybe 1 or 2 more releases a year. We saw how fast the 903 image nuking was subsequently fixed and released within a week, that's the first time I have seen such urgency and from time to time this would be good to see. Snapshots could have been treated with the same urgency IMO, they are all we really have in that area and it's what anyone who comes to this forum is educated to do regularly.

I think a projected timetable would also be good, first 2 weeks in every quarter, expect an upgrade type affair. Knowing what's being fixed is also key. There is nothing more demoralising than waiting 2-3 months for the next release to find that the bugs you suffer will not be fixed.

[chris ashdown]

I can understand a few designers having problems keeping up to date, but why should the rest of us suffer for a few designers who cannot keep their records up to date

The snapshot and dmp problems are a massive problem two many just you don't get fixed

As already seen nobody is willing to test the new updates as it seems prity pointless waste of time, with little feedback and only partial tests, i.e. no MU. since about ver 7 the updates have been slow at coming and causing as many problems as they fix

It's basic common sense to fix a few at a time and consentrate on the major bugs, over the life of the version I doubt we would be talking more than a dozen updates of which the last half dozen would be very minor fixes

Pros of current system: can fairly comprehensively and end to end test the product (not possible for many small releases), less effort on the release cycle (documentation, QA, announcements etc); cons are that releases are bigger and riskier and we have to wait for fixes.

Thats a load of b-lls,testing only happens properly with a small number of fixes at a time and far easier for those willing to test and see the results, as with any complicated problem you break it down into managable sections, documentaion is easier as only a couple of things to write about and probably better explained as not overloading writter with 70 od items to write about

I myself although a support customer, will not be upgrading to V10 in the first year if ever as so pissed off with the larger problems not being sorted out as soon as possible and even more pissed off that new items are brought out to seemingly add to actinics coffers whilst necessities are put on slow burner

If I cannot just press a button and be sure I am getting a good snapshot just stinks and means I have to stay late to keep trying or just take a mdb home

[leehack]

I can understand a few designers having problems keeping up to date, but why should the rest of us suffer for a few designers who cannot keep their records up to date
You seem very against designers at the moment Chris, you don't seem to understand that a designer is just a front for numerous site owners like yourself, you are actually the minority, not the designer. It's not about us keeping up to date at all, it's about maintaining a system our end that can easily assist you the client - that's all.

Jonty recently completed your site, so one presumes you have a 903 site at the moment. Lets say for example that 904 is launched next week and Jonty upgrades so he is building in the latest version (as he should do ideally). 3 weeks down the line you want a little tweak done to the design and jonty will need a snapshot to do it for you. So his system is now 904, as are the sites he is currently building. Yours is 903 though. To work on yours he needs to upgrade it to 904, to send it back to you, you will then need to be on 904 also.

So the more times we have upgrades the more times this occurs. Are you happy to be forced to upgrade in this situation? Are you suggesting that designers should have one desktop for each actinic version that exists? maybe you think we should uninstall actinic for each build and install the version needed for each site?

I wish you'd drop this site owners vs designers bullshit, we are all after the same thing, a stable version of the software, work together FFS and stop creating barriers. Rest assured (on my son's life if you like) we as designers are shafted every bit as much as you are at the moment. I have spent as much time on nuked images, trashed snapshots, talking to actinic and suffering boat loads of DMP files as you will have on sync server and snapshot problems.

[Duncan Rounding]

Whilst I understand your gripe with MU I don't take kindly to the remark:
...why should the rest of us suffer for a few designers who cannot keep their records up to date...
- it's nothing to do with records and I don't believe designers are making others suffer.

There are arguments for and against large and small incremental updates and what they should or should not contain, whichever is the case it affects designers and all of their clients (store owners).

It's very difficult to justify the amount of time and effort that these upgrades can cause and it's made that much more difficult when you have some clients on one incremental release and others on a different one.

As you know v902 for example can't coexist on the same computer as v903. There are ways around this but they're not clean and tidy and often don't work well.

So it's nothing to do with designers keeping their records up to date, it's a constraint of Actinic. A frustration very similar to you have with MU.

Still friends Chris? I hope so.

[jont]

I really empathise with Chris as he is having a torrid time with things particularly the DMP warning he gets several times a day. Chris' main site was redesigned and the others were to be rolled out with the same concept dropped over the top. This has proven a nightmare with the MOTO getting borked each time. I am now almost having to redesign the others as if doing them from scratch which is a ludicrous state of play for both parties.

[chris ashdown]

Just to confirm I have no problems with designers and appreciate their efforts and skills on this forum( but sometimes they do appear to sound like they are talking for the majority and that may not actually be the case)

With the present system, I have no doubts that many users are very warey of updating software as their livelyhood depends on the sites working 24/7, but would be much happier to take the risk for smaller upgrades

I hope john's designs will be strong enough for me to do any updates myself as I have always done, but yes if there is a problem I will no doubt ask his advice or the forums

[jont]

If different patch versions could co-exist that would make life better for everyone - designers don't need to keep virtual (or spare) machines, site owners could install and test the upgrade is working before upgrading, Actinic can push out the patch for wild user testing knowing the previous versions can be let untouched. There would be a greater uptake in user testing if the latest release can sit happily alongside the others.

[jont]

I hope john's designs will be strong enough for me to do any updates myself as I have always done

Could be tempting fate ... but other than the multi line input hack in the order script file they should upgrade quite nicely ... that's just condemned your site. Sorry Chris :o

[leehack]

Chris rest assured as designers we understand and empathise with what you are going through, it's the same for most of us. I'm not aware of one designer not pulling their hair out also. Myself, Duncan and Jont probably have 100-150 actinic sites between us, we see warts and all I assure you. Lets not alienate each other, stick together we might be able to help each other out more.

I suffered DMP errors very badly but have found a way to avoid them mostly. Selectors in the design library, php layouts in the library and multiple site option or business setting changes at once caused a vast amount of mine. If you are using any of Norman's addons, get the new dpimagesupport file, Norman has addressed actinic's apparent problem with php.

The image nuking has been solved and the image paths have been fixed, so 904 should finally be a stable version. As for MU, i have no idea, i have one main client struggling as you are, he's at his wits end too, i just hope some long standing problems get solved in this version.

[Goz]

I can understand a few designers having problems keeping up to date, but why should the rest of us suffer for a few designers who cannot keep their records up to date



Sorry Chris. I normally try to keep out of these designer vs shop owner debates but I have have to comment here because I'm surprised and disappointed at that comment.

As a designer, I currently have clients at 8.5.1, 8.5.2, 8.5.3 and 9.0.3. I also run a site on 8.5.3. It is not about keeping my records up to date - it is about working with my clients and their expectations and limitations. I am expected, by my clients, to provide them with software that will work and, when it works, keep it working. I cannot ask a client on 8.5.1/2 (whose site works to their satisfaction) to upgrade to 8.5.3 or, god forbid, 9.0.x. It will cause them (and me) hassle and cost me money as my clients will not pay for an upgrade that is not beneficial to them. An upgrade may not even work for their site! And because I cannot upgrade them all to the same version I end up with 4 versions to support.

I cannot tell you the amount of time and money I have wasted/lost because of zero size backups and unexpected DMP files etc. I'm sure that is the case for you and I'm sure it applies, as designers, even more so than me, to Lee, Jont and Duncan.

I do empathise with you as, I'm sure, many designers do. There are a lot of issues with the software. However, I think that Lee has rose tinted spectacles on when he says so 904 should finally be a stable version - he should know better than that to make such rash statements :D

I have no answers to this conundrum. In a previous life I was a Development Project Manager for a financial product used by local authorities. I have an understanding of the different directions the developers get pulled in trying to satisfy all users requirements and ensuring that software updates work for everyone and all their configurations. I've always said that I wouldn't want to be in that position again.... but it looks like I'm on the other end of the stick now. And, as far as Actinic is concerned, I hope that there is just one stick and not a Designer Stick and a Shop Owner Stick (if that makes sense :confused:).

[leehack]

Good post Andrew.

he should know better than that to make such rash statements :D
I did have all body parts crossed when i said it :p.

I do genuinely think 904 will mark a stable V9 though. We are looking at 250-300 bug fixes in the last 2 releases, which surely has to do something considerable in the stability area. If not, then i think we really are screwed.

I do think the addition of new features needs to be delivered sensitively. Not only can they get overshadowed by ongoing problems, people always want things fixed before they get new things. It's a balance issue again of course and who knows what's actually right, however for me hearing about new features means very little when fundamental operations are not working.

[markburley]

I have been using version 9.03 since December. Every other time we upload it crashes, we are now in April and I have still the same problems (although a fix is promised with the new beta).

Four months of crashes and failed uploads are a huge problem, compounded by the fact that the linked database causes Actinic to take over five minutes to load after a crash has occurred. We must have lost several days work whilst waiting for Actinic to reload.

Going back to a previous version was not an option as the stock control does not work when orders are manually adjusted in the earlier release.

I am frustrated and disappointed that it has taken this long for Actinic to resolve the issue, assuming the new beta does - and that does not appear to be released yet.

When we purchased the software we knew what functionality it had - more is just a bonus - however working software is a must and should take priority over everything.

Please Actinic concentrate on getting a stable version of software that functions correctly - the bells and whistles can wait.

Mark

http://www.modelrailwaysdirect.co.uk

[george]

I have been using version 9.03 since December. Every other time we upload it crashes, we are now in April and I have still the same problems (although a fix is promised with the new beta).

Jeezus :eek:


Has adding the Third Man (only useful if using Actinic Payments I think) check held up fixing this clients upload issue?

[pnagames]

i dont think you can work on small patches with a software like actinic unfortunately. (unless ofcourse you have a bug that make the whole software completely useless)

also if you consider the amount of testing that should be done on each patch then as a user and a development company you can benefit from having larger patches (lesser testing cycles)

but saying that the testing process must be spot on so it can capture majority of bugs

i dont agree with actinic adding new features in patches. to me patches are just for fixing existing bugs. adding new features brings more trouble.

[cbarling]

I'm locking this thread and deleting various posts as it seems to be simply be turning into non-constructive criticism of Actinic.

If anybody feels this is unreasonable, maybe they would like to send their last customer complaint to me together with a complete list of their customers, so I can pass the complaint to all of them?

Please don't take these comments as meaning that we think everything is fine or that we don't care.

We do, and that's why the vast majority of development effort since v9.0.3 has gone into v9.0.4 bug fixing, which will be out in a few weeks. Why not give that a chance?

Chris