To be fair, Feedback is approximately 10 years old now. When it was developed, there was no Xojo Web Edition. WebSockets weren’t a thing. Windows still used Internet Explorer… and Windows Vista was the newest version. The web was a very different place.
If Feedback were being started today, maybe a different decision would be made regarding desktop vs web. But it isn’t. Rebooting it again I don’t think is very high on the priority list.
[quote=429637:@Geoff Perlman]The overwhelming majority of our users have no trouble using Feedback. It’s hardly more of a burden to install an app as it is to visit a website. There absolutely are benefits to web applications and there would be benefits to Feedback being one (it would make it easier for us to update just as one example) but I think it’s overstating things to say that it’s a joke.
As for an active subscription, that requirement went away long ago. Anyone can report bugs. We only ask that you report them against the current version which you can test with even if it’s not the version you use. There’s little point in reporting a bug against 2017r4 when the current release is 2018r4 in which the bug may not long be reproducible.
You’re correct that people will promote their own cases first. That’s the entire point of the system. The more people that promote the same cases, the more those cases come to our attention. That system is one of many variables we taken into account when considering which bugs to fix.
The balancing act of knowing which bugs to tackle versus the time spent on features is a difficult one for nearly every software developer. There’s no good metric for the impact on users of a particular feature versus a bug or handful of bugs. Just as an extreme example, say there’s a bug that has been around for years and massively effects just a single user. We estimate the bug will take a month to fix. In that month, we could instead implement a new feature that every user will appreciate. Generally speaking we set priorities based upon the overall impact on our users. The bugs that affect more users (even if they haven’t been reported yet by a lot of users) will get fixed sooner than those that affect a few. The difference with Pro Plus is that those users have their livelihoods dependent on Xojo so they are willing to pay more to get some of their most important issues resolved quicker than they might otherwise have been resolved because they impact their projects but not many other user’s projects.
It’s not the perfect system to be sure but it’s the best one we have found so far.[/quote]
I stand corrected on the subscription requirements. Thank you for that.
As far as knowing which bugs to tackle, look at it like traffic policing on a router or firewall. Sure, you service the higher priority queues first but unless you go back and service the lower queues every once in a while that traffic starves and eventually gets dropped. If you only work on the higher priority and the most user-affecting bugs (and there will always be higher priority bugs) and never go back and put some work cycles into fixing the less important ones that are years old and may only affect a few people but still cause issues, they will never get fixed. For any product, having a verified but unfixed bug for a long period of time should be unacceptable. This is why I wish Xojo would put a feature freeze on the application for a year so and just put all efforts into clearing the bug queue. Maybe I’m alone in that wish but I feel it would be worth the wait on new features.
[quote=429639:@Thom McGrath]To be fair, Feedback is approximately 10 years old now. When it was developed, there was no Xojo Web Edition. WebSockets weren’t a thing. Windows still used Internet Explorer… and Windows Vista was the newest version. The web was a very different place.
If Feedback were being started today, maybe a different decision would be made regarding desktop vs web. But it isn’t. Rebooting it again I don’t think is very high on the priority list.[/quote]
Very good point, although I bet the Xojo Dev guys could spin it out in a week using Xojo Web Edition. Seriously, I really like that piece of Xojo!
Remember verified ? verified as a bug
This.
The reality is no system is perfect and the minute you try to please everyone, you’re doomed. Business decisions need to be made, and paying more attention to higher paying customers is nothing new and is backed by sound logic. It’s ingrained in almost all business models.
I am not a Pro+ subscriber but if my livelihood depended on Xojo I sure as heck would be.