General Why do software developers make it difficult (1 Viewer)

[Tracy]

To do something as simple as submit data that they say "send to us"?
KStars is a classic case. They encourage you to send in your mycities.dat (or mycities.sqlite if using Stellarmate).
I have added many of our Texas State Parks that are either IDS recognized or at least Bortle 3 or lower. They are all open to the public, have camping (fee charged), some of which is primitive and others actually have electric/water.
The problem is, they fail to give you an email to send the data to... or a link to where you can submit it to.

I ended up attaching it to an open ticket I had at StellarMate that Jasem was handling.
But they REALLY need to get a better way of sending stuff if they want to expand their data set.

 

[OhNo]

I have just about had enough with software developers. Especially the AP ones. Ummmm test the stuff in the "Real" world before you release it, and then the end user discovering it doesn't work. The standard response is "it worked on the simulator"!

The software game seems to be about market share. But to the end user it looks like a dog chasin' it's tail!

 

[Tracy]

It is... but it's somewhat worse in the open source market... as they are not really doing it for pay... it's a labor of love for them.
KStars is a perfect example... heck, most of the Linux world programs are that way.
Now, for a software I have to PAY for? I expect it to work, and not come out and "oops, it's a bug" biting you in the ass regularly. That's what BETA testers are for. You update your code, you ship it out to your BETA testers and let them bang around with it... fix any bugs they find and then once you are reasonably sure you have no outstanding issues, you release the code. And I've been around computers long enough to know that no code is perfect, nor do I expect it to be. But I do expect it to get fixed when an issue is reported.

I got into "forum type" stuff before there were even forums, or even the public internet. I ran a multi-node OS/2 based BBS when I was in the Dallas area that participated in FidoNet... and I BETA tested different programs for folks back then (an offline mail reader, a FidoNet front end, an echo/net mail processor and such). Even after BETA testing those softwares, bugs would be reported because someone would be running it on a different type computer (more/less memory, etc) and they would be trying stuff that we testers had not .