dhbailey wrote:
Noel Stoutenburg wrote:
[snip]>
I have experienced something that bears on this matter, namely that MakeMusic! was wrong again this year on their intended shipping date. You may remember how last year, the product was announced at the end of July, anticipating shipping the middle of August, and only the Windows version shipped at the end of August. This year, the public product announcement was on August 16, with shipping anticipated on the 20th or so. This did not happen. My copy shipped on August 18, EARLIER than I was told the estimated ship date would be.
Thus, when Aaron sent in his report about the bug to support, my copy of the software was already in transit.
If Aaron discovered it on his first attempt to use the enhanced tuplets, in the demo that they are using to lure new customers, on a feature that is one of the major new enhancements they are touting, then either they knew about it well before letting the product go "gold" or they have a lousy beta-testing program that doesn't require beta-testers to actually try out new features.
I find it hard to believe that NOBODY in the entire process, from developpers to alpha-testers to beta-testers never ever tried to move a note using enhanced tuplets or to begin a tuplet with a rest.
Neither scenario, they knew about the enhanced tuplet bug and shipped anyway or none of their testing actually edited the enhanced tuplets, is a pleasant one.
The tech-support reply that Aaron received, however, indicates that they knew about the bug. The reply didn't contain any "Oh my goodness, we've never seen that before -- we'll start working on it right now to fix it in the patch." Instead it was more along the lines of we'll try to fix it by the time the patch will be released. Why not hold up the patch until the damn bug is fixed?
If Sibelius were any better in any of these regards (fixing bugs quickly with interim patches, not containing annoying gotchas where the tech support says "yeah, we know about those, they're on the long list of things to try to fix in a future upgrade") Finale would definitely get left behind. But they're just as bad at not fixing long-standing bugs that some users have been complaining about for a long time as well as introducing new bugs and saying "we'll try to fix it in a future upgrade."
So that rather than the two companies really goading each other into offering superior products to each other, instead they seem to be matching each other in corporate attitude.
I'm one lost sale of 2005 because of this problem. Much of the music I deal with is 'tuplet-heavy'...the new tuplet function was the sole feature that would make the upgrade worth the money. Now it appears it wouldn't be.
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