user notes undo behavior

[Ken Han]

This is something I've noticed before, but finally decided to investigate after I saw a user note completely disappear on me last night. Since then I haven't been able to reproduce it, but it happened roughly in this sequence.

 

I edited my user note in Prov 2:7, 8, and so on until 2:11. I decided to partially undo the changes I made in 2:11 with cmd-z, and at that moment my notes on 2:11 completely vanished and was replaced with content from 2:7, even though the title bar of the open edit window said 2:11, the content inside was

 

Prov 2:7

etc...

 

After this point no amount of cmd-z would bring back what was there for 2:11. To make clear, there was previously saved content in 2:11 note before I APPENDED new content, and neither the new or the previously saved content was there any longer.

 

Again, I've not been able to reproduce this behavior, but a related question is how undo behaves inside Accordance. In standard OS X apps like TextEdit or Pages, undo seems to function in "blocks." If I type a sequence of characters relatively quickly, cmd-z will undo that whole block. And, of course, there's usually a undo-tree, which lets me undo and redo as much edit as possible.

 

Inside Accordance edit window, undo behaves differently:

 

1. There seems to be only ONE level of undo. So if I type lines 1-2, pause a little without saving, and type lines 3-4, cmd-z will only erase and then restore lines 3-4 without traversing back to earlier edits in lines 1-2, even if I haven't saved the user note edit since opening the edit window. This is a non-standard behavior, and a limitation not do traverse back up the undo-tree.

 

2. cmd-z strictly redoes the last action. In TextEdit or Pages, cmd-z will remove the last edit, and keep removing older edits, and in order to undo the cmd-z, cmd-shift-z is required. So cmd-z does undo, and cmd-shift-z reverses the undo. In Accordance cmd-z erases the last edit, and another cmd-z brings it back. So cmd-z does the opposite of the last action, which is non-standard.

 

3. After editing user notes, if I pause long enough, cmd-z no longer can undo last edits even though I have not saved the edit or closed/re-opened the edit window. The edit history seems to vanish. Again, a non-standard behavior.

 

So, bottom line, please make Accordance undo behave more standard way.

Edited July 18, 2013 by Ken Han

[Joel Brown]

Thanks for your feedback, Ken. We agree that the Undo deserves some attention, and will be addressing it!

[Ken Han]

Wonderful, and thanks, Joel. I read in another thread you're planning to revamp the user notes. I'm eagerly looking forward to it!

[Ken Han]

11.1.2 release. This bug bit me again yesterday, leading to data loss. In order to get back the lost content (since cmd-z will not undo this loss) I had to restore my entire user note file using Time Machine, leading to the loss of all incremental edits I made since the last Time Machine backup. I made the original bug report over 2 years ago. I don't understand why bugs that cause data loss is not higher on the fix priority. I really didn't have the time to deal with this bug yesterday, but what choice did I have?

 

Lately Accordance has been a significant source of stress for me. User tool heading hierarchy problems still exit. One of my user tools was so unbelievably messed up with so many misplaced and unremovable "T"s that I had to copy the whole user note out my tool, erase my user tool file, recreate it, and paste it back in as plain text. All the organizational work I've put into the file over the last months and years? Poof. Gone. 

 

Also, after making an extensive edit in another user file, the last step being adding auto scripture links, the user note refused to save complaining there was an extra character at the end of scripture link, but not indicating **which** scripture link was causing the problem. Given no other solution to fix this, I had to close the edit window opting not to save the edits I made. Again, work lost.

 

One takes certain risks when working with Aleph/beta. But these problems are from the stable 11.1.2 release version. I have invested a lot into Accordance over the years, time, effort, money. I used to love it. I realize my view of Accordance has been changing. I now merely put up with it because of all the investments, but no longer love it. I noticed over the last few years that a huge amount of changes are introduced around November ahead of ETS/SBL. These tend to be changes/features quite not ready for release, which are fine for beta testing, but not suited for general release. Then the next several months is a significant rise in bugs. Not cool. 

 

Accordance needs a kind of Snow Leopard release. No more new features. Fix all the bugs.

[Joel Brown]

Ken, thank you for your post.

 

I completely understand your frustration, and I can understand your general perspective of Accordance.  Let me start off by saying that we are absolutely not trying to rush features out the door in a beta state.  We also greatly value our users' feedback, and strive to fix bugs as soon as we are able.  Unfortunately, improving the Undo is a massive, difficult undertaking, and we simply have had other matters take priority so far.  If it helps, Undo improvements have been slotted for 11.2, so you should get them much sooner rather than later.

 

 

With regards to Accordance's recent releases, I would have to disagree that most of our changes and features were not suited for release.  If you consider the Info Pane, Research, Quick Entry, Bookmarks, Get Verses, accord:// URLs, MT-LXX analysis, and Imported Texts improvements, while not 100% bug free, they have generally been rock solid.  Only minor occasional issues have been found, and I doubt many would argue they were only at a beta testing level of polish.

 

Now, I understand that User Notes and User Tools are of very high priority to you, and I do recognize that these have had more issues than the other features we have put out. Allowing the user to create content leads to drastically much higher variability of actions and thus potential for issues.  We tested and tested and fixed as many issues as we could, but at the end of the day, when no major issues were being reported by the beta testers (including you), we had to release it, so all of our users could take advantage of the features.  Now, you obviously might say that the Undo is a major issue (which I understand), but it affects such a small use case of a small percentage of our users, and it requires such a significant amount of work to fix, we again didn't want to delay the rest of our user-base from having access to everything else.

 

Finally, please understand that dramatic, under-the-hood restructures of User content is likely the most dangerous change we could ever make as a programming team (which we did!), but now that it has been done, we won't have to do any sort of rebuild again for a very long time.  We should be able to simply identify and fix bugs, moving on, rather than writing swatches of new code that potentially have created more issues.  In reality, with the fixes present in 11.1.3, and once we address the Undo in 11.2, I believe you'll finally be happy with the stability of user content.

 

Again, thank you for your post, and I hope you can look forward to the Undo improvements and other fixes.