Severe disappointment

[Zav - Alex Zavatone]

>on 5/29/03 7:16 PM, Zav - Alex Zavatone at zavpublic at mac.com wrote:
>
>Hi Zav,
>
>>  Please bear with me since this is not pretty.
>>
>>  I have asked for this once before and stated that my need was rather
>>  important.
>>
>>  Partially, as a result of the crashes in Valentina, I am having to
>>  bail on a twenty thousand dollar contract and return ten thousand
>>  dollars to the client.
>>
>>  Ruslan I formally BEG you to evaluate putting in ONE if statement in
>>  opendatabase to check if Valentina is properly inited return an error
>  > message instead of crashing Director if it not.
>
>I will do this of course.
>

Thank you.

>  > You said, you wanted speed in your xtra?  I want my xtras NOT TO
>>  CRASH MY PROJECT while I am creating it.  One if statement should not
>>  impact performance by any large margin.  I have no idea why you will
>>  still not do this for your customers.  This simple check will help
>>  trap the majority of crashes since you have to open a database before
>>  you do any operations on it right?
>
>I have told you that if you set DebugLevel 2
>Then Valentina start do that checks.

And I told you that is does not.  It STILL crashes Director on OS X. 
And When Director crashes on OS X, you can not save any changes you 
have made to the project.  My momentum and changes are both lost


>And again, I have told that Database Xtras do not like INTERACTIVE calls of
>database methods from Message Window. You need set up script functions and
>they must be executed as ATOMIC calls.
>
>>  Valentina as an xtra to Director MUST play nicely within the world of
>>  Director but I understand you can not and should not trap all
>>  handlers for improper actions.
>>

>  > Simply not protecting your users by checking that Valentina is inited
>>  properly open Database is unconscionable.
>
>>  If you doubt my programming background and aptitude, please bear in
>>  mind that I spent 4 years on the Director and Shockwave development
>>  teams, co founded Director-Online and have written my own foundation
>>  classes for Director, edited Lingo In a Nutshell and have contributed
>>  to the Director user community since 1996.
>
>In the same time I afraid you are the first developer who have fail to
>finish project with V4MD.

To the tune of ten thousand dollars.

I USE Director.   Bend it, break it, make it do difficult things.  It 
is very hard for me to not use the message window to test things out 
and create a project.

>I am very upset too.
>
>And I think, you was need better pay few hundreds of $$$ to some developer
>which could help you. Because excuse me, if you was need 2 weeks to simply
>create table and add few records, this sounds not confusing...

This is a second job.  I have arthritis in my spine from working at 
Macormedia.  Before this, I could deal with most anything.  After 
this, many things new and difficult become unmanageable.  Dealing 
with creating a complex application and trying to learn an xtra that 
crashes my development environment makes it nearly impossible to

>At least one developer Gunnar, have point you many times that Valentina is
>very stable. And believe me, during last years, hundreds developer have get
>success with V4MD and other Valentina products to develop projects and apps
>which are distributed up to tens of thousands of copies.

Yes and Gunnar has stated to me that he had the same problem with 
Valentina that I have.  Finally, today, I realized that he wrote a 
valentina manager object that would handle the case of valentina 
being inited or not when making call to the xtra.  Though this is 
nice to finally understand, it is several months too late.

>And I wonder...you have keep silent too long.
>Gunnar was going help you. Everybody was sure that you are all right.
>Zav, I think many developer can confirm that when somebody have catch
>deadline crisis, I have not go sleep until we get together success.
>And up to now I have never get payment for such kind of support btw.
>Just Your success is my success.  Your failure is my failure.
>You was need cry on list. You was need ask me for help if all was so bad.

I DID ask you and you told me that you wanted speed and not to use 
the message window.  This was not much help and in the end, I could 
not regain the momentum to finish the project.

This is my first major failure and I'm not very happy about it either.

>Let's hope in future you will know this.

Let's hope I can scrounge up ten thousand dollars to pay my client back.

I look forwards to working past this.
-- 
- Zav
Wanted:  One new spine.  Accepting applications from potential donors.