marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Tuesday, September 7, 2004
Rant of the week: iWork
I had been watching iWorks for the past year and when I recently wanted to redo my business stationary, it came again to my attention. Before that I had been using TimeLog for several months - which had been quite reliable with just a few quirks, but the coder very responsive to fix them and/or to help plus he was a Swiss who by - how big is this world - chance I knew as we had worked together on a CD-Rom project 7 years ago - so TimeLog had the tracking down plus the integration into iCal, but when it came to writing estimates and/or invoices, I still used an old stationary of mine in Apple Works 6 which was often not flexible enough to encompass what I wanted.
That is when I again stumbled over iWork - see at VersionTracker both versions of iWork. And yes, that is me in person that ranted there today and left a negative feedback in regards to the CLIENT version of iWork.
What does it take until I rant like that? Usually quite a lot. When I originally had gotten the single-user version, I thought my dreams for a small business time tracking and billing application have been met - I then switched to the multi-user version, expecting the same quality but with the added ability of using the same database on my desktop as well as on my powerbook. I guess this is when my problems began. As noted in the VersionTracker review, I have lost whole, tracked projects and estimates and lost a lot of time trying to jump over hurdles and oddities et all, but today it got topped off with the following:
Creating an Estimate and the effort it takes:
a) Create a new project, name it estimate, working on my desktop because that has the bigger monitor. so far so good.
b) Beginning to create job-event-groups (basically a container for single job events) and pasting some note data into each of them. During the process it deletes 3x an already existing notes field (see bug d at the bottom) and I track down what is happening and note down the bug. Have to recopy the data for those 3 note fields (find the original email on my powerbook, find the paragraph, select, copy, send to desktop via ClipboardSharing, paste).
c) Now I want to begin inserting the jobs into the groups. realize that the desktop does not have all the job events I’ve created on the powerbook (my version does not share that, nope - but it seems the next version which now is in beta, does). so I quit the client on the desktop and launch the client on the powerbook to be able to insert the job event.
d) The already created job-event-groups are not read into iWork in the same order I had created them and had them on the desktop, now they order differently and not how I want them to. Okay, so I number the groups and now I can sort by name which at the same time is the sequence in which I had created the entries in the first place.
e) I select a job-event-group and select ‘insert event x’ - it does not insert it into the group (as it did in the past) but ads the event at the bottom of the list, outside of all groups. Why this happened is a mystery to me and it does not re-occur after this, so it’s again one of these freak things nobody can track and/or replicate - but it did happen and stops my workflow.
f) So I click onto this newly created event and drag it onto the existing job event group A - what this does though is it drags that event x PLUS the last job-event-group, named G, into the job-event-group-A (but I had not selected that job event group G!)
g) Okay, so I think, so I drag-out job-event-group-G again to the bottom of the list where it belongs to - hah! When I let go of the mouse, it just disappears! inclusive handwritten note and all. just gone (this is not the first time something like this happens). Now I have to re-create job-event-group-G from scratch (because ‘undo’ will not bring it back) and remember what I had written in the note and write that again.
h) Great. By now the effort to write this estimate has been way higher then it should be; I am frustrated and so I go and get a cup of coffee. Who knows, maybe this and some toasted bread with Swiss marmalade (quinces! yummie) will help my sour humor.
i) By now I am very careful in what I do and it’s going okay, up to the point when I go into the job-event-edit window. Here I create a new event, it does this at the bottom of the list. So I want to drag-drop it into place (I order the list alphabetically so I can find quickly what I am looking for). But when I drop it, it doesn’t drop to where it previewed it would (between the first entry B and the first entry C) and it shoves another line further down, i.e. goes on top of the first entry B. so now my order is wrong. I try again. Same result, but now suddenly C got shoved before B in the list. So now I select the C entry and drag it down. Hell, now I suddenly LOST the C entry - yes, it disappeared but I have TWO entries of the new B entry (which I don’t need, thank you) grinning at me. Grrr, my humor is dropping even lower, because now I have to fix THIS list before continuing. maybe another cup of coffee?
j) I close the window, too frustrated to do it, and open it a second later as it just has to be done. Now the missing C entry is back in there again and I have on top of that a double entry of the orignial new B entry which I had been moving around. Deleting an entry is easier than recreating, I think and almost relieved select the lower of the new B entries and click REMOVE and then I close that window but only to find out that ‘add entry’ and ‘insert entry’ do not seem to communicate well with each other, add entry dropdown menu sees the list now correctly but insert entry dropdown menu still shows the double entry.
k) Okay, okay, I go back into the event-edit window and bingo, what I deleted is now there again: 2 entries of this B entry are sitting there, maliciously grinning. You won’t get me, I think and I select again the lower of the double B entry and I deleted the ‘double entry’ by clicking onto REMOVE - but nope! It deletes the first C entry just below my selection and the double entry is STILL grinning at me, trying to convince me that I am clicking onto wrong lines and it’s all my fault.
l) Of course I then have to recreate the lost C entry. Go back into the main window and continue working - the only further serious hiccup being that one event entry when I name it will bug and put the name on top of everything else and the window will not redraw, no matter in which project I switch, the 3 words of that job event entry stick to the top left, first row. I have to quit and relaunch iWork to get rid of that problem.
m) The other quirk is that at some point it doesn’t allow me to change the rate, this after I switch a couple of times between ‘hourly tracking’ and ‘flat fee’ for 2 specific entries. I fix that by deleting the entries and re-entering them.
I assume, by now some people might understand why by now I don’t trust this piece of software, and I am not even speaking of the projects I truly LOST (just didn’t show up anymore, the data files could not be read nor recovered). If iWork would do what it’s aiming at to do, it’s exactly what I want. But the amount of quirks make it such a tripple pain and DANGEROUS to use (one never knows when a project disappears into nirvana or just an entry or what just feels like going BONG) - and I spent good money on it too, so it irks me to just drop it. I did test drive the single version which had seemed okay at the time, but - if things don’t get fixed, I might just have to look for another solution.
Some (other) bugs which I noted in iWorks CLIENT:
a) hide another application: iWorks pops to the front, even when it should remain hidden.
b) on the machine where the server is, it never remembers margins set in a template, each time I have to enter them again.
c) does not remember column widths set, have to reset each time when I go back into a project and/or open iWork.
d) tab in a JOB EVENT GROUP does not go into NOTES but into NOTES field of a higher entry and at the same time deletes that already existing entry, thus if not watching like a hawk, one overwrites by mistake a higher note field.
e) I select the first JOB EVENT GROUP in the list and select INSERT (mtw, this is grayed out when it shouldn’s) and from here I select UNTITLED. It inserts the job event but the selection jumps from the FIRST job event group to the 7. LINE in the list (which is not the just inserted line).
and I am sure I haven’t even listed them all.
created mid-afternoon - it was 4:36 pm to be exact | trackback |
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