v9.0.3 Public Beta

[Darren B]

Definitely noticed a big improvement in upload speed on one site that's reasonably large with around 2500 products, although to benefit the most your host needs to have Archive::zip installed

[Darren B]

OK i thought this had been fixed going by the release notes

"Meta tags for brochure pages now appear correctly AC9-2057"

well i certainly does not work for a site im working on at present, the brochure page titles are still wrong. Does anyone else see this?

[Benjamin Dyer]

Hi Darren and others,

If you have any feedback regarding the beta if you could please email v9.beta@actinic.co.uk then we can investigate. Having a dedicated email address just means that we wont miss anything important, its also directed to the correct team.

Thanks!

[TraceyHand]

OK i thought this had been fixed going by the release notes

"Meta tags for brochure pages now appear correctly AC9-2057"

well i certainly does not work for a site im working on at present, the brochure page titles are still wrong. Does anyone else see this?

I'm seeing a number of things...my report will be going in after tonight when I've repeated and confirmed them

[Darren B]

Hi Darren and others,

If you have any feedback regarding the beta if you could please email v9.beta@actinic.co.uk then we can investigate. Having a dedicated email address just means that we wont miss anything important, its also directed to the correct team.

Thanks!

Hi Ben i have already, i was merely asking if it was local to me.

[Darren B]

Ben you might want to get someone to sort the beta emails out - i email the beta support address and got an out of office reply telling me to email the beta support email

[Benjamin Dyer]

Fixed, thanks Darren, the mailing list had a member with an out of office set.

[leehack]

Ben, there is nothing more frustrating than doing an in depth bug report only to find out 3 others have done the same. Can we not get some kind of forum or central place where a thread is started per problem and people add their thoughts and issues on that problem. Kind of like a central collation point.

I can understand if this needs to be away from the main forum and not so public, but it'd be great to know what has been reported and what has not and add your findings to something someone else has found. Collectively we could solve things better because sometimes you have a problem, but baffled on what causes it.

I think this area might need looking at personally, I know that in some chats offline with other designers, we can often help out or explain things better between us.

[Benjamin Dyer]

Hi Lee,

Yes this is something we have been considering for some time, if you could leave it with me for now as this obviously needs some though and discussion with the team.

[Darren B]

Ben, there is nothing more frustrating than doing an in depth bug report only to find out 3 others have done the same. Can we not get some kind of forum or central place where a thread is started per problem and people add their thoughts and issues on that problem. Kind of like a central collation point.

I can understand if this needs to be away from the main forum and not so public, but it'd be great to know what has been reported and what has not and add your findings to something someone else has found. Collectively we could solve things better because sometimes you have a problem, but baffled on what causes it.

I think this area might need looking at personally, I know that in some chats offline with other designers, we can often help out or explain things better between us.

i could not agree more, it has been mentioned recently, a support ticketing system is what is required. With username and passwords to prevent the outside world looking in. there are plenty of systems out there

D

[Duncan Rounding]

I completely agree with the idea of collaborative feedback and testing.
Obviously it would need to be private - I would have no issue having with an NDA for this purpose.

[nileshpa]

Sorry but I hate to say this that somehow I feel a bit cheated by yesterdays release of V9.0.3. Not sure if I'm alone here thinking, that what was expected out yesterday was going to be GA that we could upgrade to with confidence. I was very surprised to see some Beta release that was still undergoing further testing.

Been cynical here, but was yesterdays release issued just to meet the date commited by Chris B on one of his earlier post?.

I'm not playing politics here & I know majority of the users haven't been hit by V9.0.2. Unfortunatley, those like myself who have, the last 4+ months have been pretty awful & at times very frustrating. Not just the delay of V9.0.3 that has annoyed me, but we have been told by Support staff that issues we encountered way back in July are possibly cleared in V9.0.3 & won't commit to any dates, simply stating "Shortly or soon".

I'm sure Actinic at some stage knew that it would take some time for V9.0.3 to come out, then why did they not help resolve problems people were facing & provide one-off fixes to them.

My apologies for this rant but my personal feeling is that Actinic havn't really been playing fair.

Nilesh

[Benjamin Dyer]

Hi Nilesh,

Sorry to hear that, I guess its partly my fault for not being as communicative as I could be. If anything we have probably been a little too heads down trying to get the release out.

We know its been a long time coming, and I will make sure your comments are fed back appropriately.

[george]

Amusing thread.

I actually sympathise with the people who are waiting for a feature or two to be `repaired` and are frustrated that the couple of additional features have possibly added to the delay in the release of this version which has so many essential bug fixes.

I think Actinic, in future, must not release a version with `bits` that simply don't work. I read Lee posting about the design snapshots still not working. I mean, why does it get to the production version if it does not do what its supposed to?

I don't post so much anymore but its obvious to even a casual reader of the forum that one of the main reasons for updated versions is to recify things that possibly should not have made it to a production version in the first place.

(The fact that there are so many different machines, networks, etc, even OS adds to potential issues I know but if people are paying £400+ or whatever for software they expect it to do what it says on the tin).

[leehack]

I would say on this release that hindsight would be wonderful. If we could roll back 4 months, we could possibly have the first 2 months on essential bug fixes, which would be relatively quickly fixed and then have 2 months on the testing and release of the new features. We could even launch 903 as the start of V9.

The only problem with that is that after the 2 months of big fixes, there will still be other bugs people want fixed, meaning at least 4 months until they get addressed. I for one have longed for a wow factor with an Actinic release for quite some time. This release is hopefully going to provide that, but in doing so it has meant people are waiting for fundamental bugs to be fixed a bit longer than you'd hope.

Balancing bug fixing and new features must be a nightmare on releases, one biggie can set many things back. I guess there are 2 main lessons to learn, you cannot please everybody ever and initial software releases must be much better. I've long been a critic of some things they do and I am the most impatient sod, but for me although not perfect, the steps they are taking and the transparency they are illustrating is great. I am prepared to keep waiting for 903 full release, but it really does need to be soon.