Thanks for providing some insights on the issues, Dan. I share most of what is being said in this thread though. This has been discussed many times in the past 3-4 years that rolling out big changes without warning is extremely painful for gadget developers. We spend countless hours dealing with customers reporting issues with no way to reproduce the problem from our end when this is a stagger roll out.
I am surely disappointed that after the several previous similar problems we have faced in the past, we are still at the same point: doing fire-fighting on issues that could have been easily avoided by doing a pre-roll-out in a test environment (sandbox) with an announcement to developers of what was coming ahead and a one week to assess how the new code is going. Jerome On Jun 11, 8:18 am, Matt Kruse <[email protected]> wrote: > On Jun 11, 2:55 am, String <[email protected]> wrote: > > > There's a real feeling of abandonment on the forum, that Google has > > broken our gadgets in the production environment - with no warning > > before the fact, and next-to-no feedback from official channels after > > the fact. > > Indeed, it is extremely frustrating. But this has been the pattern of > iGoogle development all along, I guess it's just how it works. > > It seems like these things are so badly planned. Some points: > > 1) Some warning of big changes like this would be nice. Even just a > post in here. > > 2) Give developers the chance to opt-in to a beta testing program with > their gadgets first! > > 3) Seemingly applying the new rendering code at random is the worst > idea! Half my gadgets break, half don't. Some break for me, but not > others. I have no way of knowing why, because I didn't even know that > the v2 was in place. I can't change my gadget code because not every > user is seeing the v2 changes. This kind of random roll-out of changes > just seems terrible. > > 4) When you break functionality, please fix it ASAP! Do you know that > us developers start getting emails from annoyed users when you break > our gadgets in production? It's such a hassle. It takes time away from > me. > > 5) Please do better testing. I can't believe that simple functionality > like _toggle() was broken. > > 7) When problems are pointed out, please give us the chance to revert > gadgets back to the old renderer, rather than just continuing to have > a broken gadgets for days or weeks. > > 8) For some of us, iGoogle is the hub of our information feed from the > web. When it breaks, it's quite frustrating. When we continue to see > things change and our stuff broken, it's a sign that maybe we're > depending too much on a fragile technology. iGoogle feels more like a > playground than a platform. > > 9) Without user-created gadgets, iGoogle would be useless. Please > respect your developers. > > Hopefully future changes will be handled a little more smoothly. > > Matt Kruse --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "iGoogle Developer Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Gadgets-API?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
