Hi Andrew, another separated reply ...
> Well, again this email is not intended to spawn specific responses to > any examples used but rather to stimulate some thought and perhaps Well, but you started an example, so let me use exactly this example for a small illustration how *sometimes* decisions are made :) > When Base first shipped there was a default action for date controls, > such that the control automatically set the value to the current date. A > number of people raised this as an issue. So it was fixed. The fix was > to make it so that there was no default value. I was inactive at the > time this happened, but in researching this I don't see any where a > question to anyone about what the best solution was, it was just changed. > > Fine right - I say no it was not fine. Here is why. > ... A sub set of what nowadays would be called the "Base iTeam" met and asked themselves (since the issue constantly popped up) whether we can change something which fixes more than it breaks. While we accepted that the chose solution is not optimal, it seemed to us that more users would be happy (or: less users would be unhappy) with introducing a macro to insert the current date/time than the other way round. So, we decided to simply remove the "current date/time default" (the more since that was a relict from times where the form controls were implemented to serve in StarOffice's HTML browser, which is rightfully dead for a long time). Given the number of complaints we receive about this (1? 2? Something like this), compared with the number of complaints we received for the old behavior, I think we were right in assuming that we can judge our user base properly here :). As said, this is an illustration only how it *sometimes* works :) Ciao Frank -- - Frank Schönheit, Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] - - Sun Microsystems http://www.sun.com/staroffice - - OpenOffice.org Base http://dba.openoffice.org - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
