Day: January 8, 2016

I have two blogging programs that I use regularly.

The one I’m using right now is reliable and a workhorse but sometimes it’s a bit more than I really need and its interface is dated and perhaps a little “busy” when I’m interested in just typing.

The Other Blogging program is simple and features the newer “Open” design that many programs are moving to. The newer programs seem to be leaning toward minimalist icons in the menu, and a generally Spartan appearance. I like the look and feel of the newer interfaces, as a result I gravitate toward programs that are using the Spartan look.

Which leads me to some of the problems that new software can exhibit…

Software that’s a bit buggy, or in this case a lot buggy. The newer program has some issues with its spellcheck. “Issues” is me being polite.

Their implementation of spell check is almost completely wrong. A couple of weeks ago I went to great lengths to document how wrong they were.

Oh I was nice. I’d noticed the problems and when to their website to see if there was an estimated date when they’d have it fixed. On their site I saw many people leaving messages about things not working right but no-one was really specific.

The impression I got from the replies the company was writing, was that they didn’t understand what the users were complaining about.

I’m an OLD ASS SQA guy. 

So I figured I’d define the problem in a way that the programmers would understand.

I opened my copy of their program and started checking and unchecking options in the spellcheck system. Then I was doing screen capture and boiling down my procedure to recreate the problems into five or six steps. I put it all together and sent it off to the person at their company who takes care of these sorts of things.

I got a very nice email back saying, “Thank you, we get it now, and we’re working to fix the problem.”

“Cool,” I think.

Then I set all the settings back to my preferred conditions in their program and went on with my life.

Then, over the past couple of days I’ve been firing up the program to write quick little blogs. The program is highlighting some spelling errors but not others. I didn’t notice the inconsistency until this morning. The other thing the program is doing is this. It’s autocorrecting things as I type and doing that wrong!

I go back re-check the settings and confirm that indeed, the little check marks are having absolutely no effect. Which means another bug report to the company and that when they update the program they may have to have the customers do a complete uninstallation and then reinstall the program. That’s seriously ugly! Somewhere along the line, either using the program or changing the settings, the program has lost control of it’s preferences file.

Uh OH!  This means that Blogs I’ve written over the past few days are probably horribly screwed up!

Sure enough, I go out to the blog site and find that not only did the program not schedule things right, it also did some really bad things to spelling in the blogs posted over the last couple of days. 

So I’m falling back to the reliable old workhorse until the programmers get a handle on the defects in the new program.

Maybe I’ll hit the manufacturer of the new blogging program, up for a job. They could use my assistance!