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Thomas Fuchs
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Feb 11, 2005 - 3:21 AM
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Hello there,
First off, thanks for your hard work and this fine library. I have purchased Prof-UIS without even trying it out before and that was not only because of its features. The main reason is your excellent and, top of all, prompt feedback here.
However (and here comes the big but...), you should think about to invest a bit more time and effort to your documentation rather than working on new features. Your customers are not buying a bunches of code lines only, they want a programming tool. Even though Prof-UIS surely is a complex tool it’s just like with any other tool, too: it’s only as good as Joe Blow is able to work with, considering that not everybody is a MFC crack.
You may now argue that, if someone has any kind of question, he’s more than welcome to contact the support. But that is not the point here, since I am sure your support is excellent as said before. The point is that I don’t want to study thousands of code lines (and that includes your samples) just to find out why this or that is not working the way I expect it, only because I can’t find any information in the documentation.
To give you a very simple example: it took me about 2 hours to find out how to get rid of this annoying popup window when doing a right-click on a plain MDI application using a standard menu bar and toolbar. My apologizes if I have missed something, but your documentation does not say a single word about that.
As for your samples I guess we all really do appreciate that you provide so many examples, however, most of them are not of real help because of the lack in code documentation. Also, instead of showing basic programming techniques using Prof-UIS we get overwhelmed with all kinds of features.
Anyway, your Articels and FAQ section in the documentation is a good start off and I’d love to see more of that!
Thanks,
Thomas
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Technical Support
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Feb 13, 2005 - 9:13 AM
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Dear Thomas,
Thank you for your kind words about Prof-UIS and critical remarks on the documentation. We agree with you that it should be improved and are working on this now. Any feedback like yours is extremely useful because it allows us to better balance our efforts between adding new features requested by the library users and better and more detailed description of what is already there in Prof-UIS. For example, we are now working on a kind of map of the sample applications. As the number of samples grows, it sometimes required additional effort to find an example of an already implemented feature. We hope it will be easier to do with the map since you will be able to see which class is implemented in which sample and visa versa, which particular solutions are implemented in which samples and visa versa, and etc. We also plan to continue updating the existent articles and writing new ones. This is also true for our FAO lists. Thank you for your feedback again! We will surely put more emphasis on these issues.
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Bjorn Lindahl
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Feb 15, 2005 - 3:00 AM
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Hi!
First off I’d also like to thank you for all the great tools included in Prof-UIS!
I agree with Thomas Fuchs comments and you seem to take his constructive criticism the right way.
I’d like to add another comment. In your samples you can find many features already implemented which you can copy to your own application. There is one flaw though. Some classes are huge and the header-files include all implementation for the class and also definitions and implementation for other classes that is used. This is, as I see it very hard code to read. You could benefit from splitting up huge classes into smaller ones in separate files. This way programmers who use your library easier find what they are looking for in the sample programs. It’s a good chance you could cut down on the many hours you have to put into answering questions in the forum (which you do very fast and accurate).
Thanks again for your great library though which help me a lot!
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Technical Support
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Feb 15, 2005 - 8:47 AM
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Dear Bjorn,
Thank you for your comments and suggestions! We will take into account your wishes for the future samples. There are also pros and cons in big and little samples and we can also agree that small applications that demonstrate some particular features would be of great help for developers. So, we will also try to find time and make a set of tutorial samples, as opposite to integral samples which you can use now.
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Dave Kymlicka
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Mar 1, 2005 - 5:16 PM
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I agree: great framework, great support, but I believe some better documentation would be greatly beneficial to us (clients), and to you (less repetition of same advice).
Realising how much effort good docs/samples require, how about making some tweaks to the forums instead?
You’ve spent considerable effort answering a lot of common questions in these forums, sometimes many times (eg: how to Show/hide ControlBars).
How about offering different ways to view forum postings? Why repeat or rewrite all your good work?
Note that some suggestions below also create useful FAQs automatically.
Some suggestions:
1. Allow us to view/sort forum postings by "Most popular postings"
Allow a rating system for each forum posting (eg: x out of 5 stars).
Logged-in users should be allowed to vote, and you could also assign a value directly, if you feel a posting is very important/popular.
I would love to be able to see common/popular issues (since I’ve got the same issues as well), and maybe get a chance to read about a common problem ahead of time such that I can pro-actively avoid it.
2. Allow us to view/sort forum postings according to categories.
Allow users to assign categories as they post, or assign categories as you answer them.
Some suggestions:
-ControlBars (how to show/hide, docking/floating, sizing)
-Toolbars
-Menus
-SDI
-MDI
-MDI Client (views, tabs, MDIChildWnd issues)
-Command Manger (how to init/destroy, how to use/enhance it)
-Grids
-GUI persistence (saving/loading state)
-GUI/mouse performance (flashing, painting, hovers, hits)
Today, my problem is docking ControlBars. Tomorrow, I’ve got Toolbars to deal with... you get the idea.
Keep up the great work!
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Technical Support
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Mar 2, 2005 - 7:35 AM
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Thank you for the comments and suggestions about the forum issues! You should agree with us that on the one hand we, as any other developer, should always aim at speeding up the development, adding new features and samples so that you and your users can get benefits from these new features. On the other hand, the good documentation is indispensable because otherwise lots of efforts are made for repetitive answers to repetitive questions, nobody benefits from this and we completely agree with you.
We will think about what can be done with regard to forums accounting for the existing web system which is used at the site. What we can do right now is to categorize the FAQ section (just as you are suggesting) and publish the most interesting questions and answers there. In other words, instead of repeating the same answers over and over again, we will put answers to the corresponding sections and post links to these FAQs in the forum.
Thank you again!
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