To all English users,
Since I started this project - English help and matching Language file (±Dec 5, 2014) - I have been diligently tracking and posting bugs and
oversights that I find in Ahnenblatt during testing, etc. necessary to do the documentation. I cannot document that which I do not know, so I have to learn what each function does and play with it, testing various behaviours as I go. Tonight, I discovered another (major) bug in Ahnenblatt, one that used to work, but has since stopped working. I know that Dirk has made changes (since I started) to the internal "database handling" (probably the culprit), as well as some bug fixes and new features.
But,
I cannot hit a moving target, so to speak - Ahnenblatt has a number of bugs that I have documented, which probably
used to work (some I am sure of), otherwise the features would not have been included. It makes my task
much more difficult if I have to thoroughly test
every function with each revision, just to see if something I have already documented has stopped working, and then report it!
As an old Pascal programmer, I understand well how bugs can appear - this latest one (011 - File/Save as/ Windows help file a.k.a. RTF, NOT WORKING!), however, is probably an example of what I call "the waterbed effect" - you push down here, but it comes up somewhere else! It also points, though, to something more serious - an apparent lack of thorough testing before releasing a new version.
In addition, I cannot help but notice that very few (exactly 3 - 647, 1074 and 1072) of the German "wishlist" bugs have been fixed since v2.83 (Oct 14, 2014). And I also notice that not a single bug or oversight I have posted in English has been addressed. Nor has anyone else posted errors to the English portion - am I the only English speaking person using Ahnenblatt who sees bugs?
To sum up, I feel as though
- my time spent tracking oversights and bugs has been (so far) for nothing,
- Ahnenblatt versions are not being tested enough before release,and
- that my time doing documentation may be spent better than testing older functions of Ahnenblatt.
So, for now I am going to continue to
use Ahnenblatt (to enter my family), rather than spend a lot of time testing and documenting. My little website (see first post in this thread) will stay (there are a few interesting tools there), but revisions to English Help may be a while in coming. I will wait until Ahnenblatt development is a little more stable. I am truly sorry to disappoint anyone.
I am not abandoning the project - I have put too much effort into it to do that - but will just "wait a while" and see how Ahnenblatt develops. This post may sound a little like whining, but I
am disappointed. Ahnenblatt is an excellent tool, and has many innovative features, but it must continue to be stable. Dirk - I know that you cannot fix all bugs at once, but do not add features at the expense of functions that already work!
![Sad :(](./images/smilies/icon_sad.gif)
Waiting now...