Re: OT: the effectiveness of Apple's bug report form?
Re: OT: the effectiveness of Apple's bug report form?
- Subject: Re: OT: the effectiveness of Apple's bug report form?
- From: "Ambrose Li" <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 22:57:34 -0500
On 25/01/07, Jean-Baptiste Yunès <email@hidden> wrote:
These are not bugs! A spelling mistake is certainly not a bug. What
is called a bug is a functional malfunction...
Certainly a spelling mistake is a bug. And in extreme cases they would
change the meaning of what is being said.
If you insist on not using the word "bug", perhaps I should have
followed IEEE Std 1044-1993 and call it an "anomaly" (and in that
standard spelling mistakes *are* anomalies, even classed as being
distinct from purely cosmetic anonalies). But they really are the same
thing.
Do you really mean that a spelling mistake discourage people using
Apple (or not) products ? For most people I don't think so. Even
serious bugs didn't discourage people using applications (provided
that they didn't crash at startup!)
No. That's why I bring up the question of *image*.
These things won't cause people to not use the software (if there are
no practical alternatives). But they project an image of "low
quality".
This is especially true of non-English localizations with translation
mistakes. I don't know if you there are any in the French
localization. But there are some in the Chinese locale that are so
wrong that Apple seems to be skipping the use of human translators and
opt for computer translations. Some translatons look so strange that
it project the image of "this must be very low quality software" to
anyone who would use it.
There are many many things in the OS that sublimally say "MacOS X is a
low-quality OS". These things include spelling mistakes, grammatical
problems, and translation errors. If they are not bugs in the eye of a
company who sells its image, I don't know what they are.
> For such trivial-to-fix-but-serious-in-the-users'-viewpoint bugs, I
> also disagree that they should also get fixed only in the next
> release. They should be fixed also in the current release, even one
> previous release.
This is not always possible at a good price! Apple is a company, they
cannot always do that...
Not even if they sell "image" and these anomalies project "poor quality"?
> I also do not agree that open source projects give good bug feedback
> because it is free (this is also very strange reasoning, IMHO).
I didn't say such a thing! But thinking about I agree provided that
"free" means "having the liberty to contribute"... I would have say
that in the "mass" of free programmers there is always somebody that
feel free to correct your bug, this is why free software model
works... But you need a critical-mass (Apple needs to pay that mass!).
No. This is false.
People who are used to reporting to open source projects will
certainly provide some information to fix the bug, maybe even provide
the fix (in the case of the "trivial" bugs I mentioned).
Can't you imagine the number of people which wanted to report a bug
each time they cannot open a non-existing file ? Yes, this is a good
Now those are *not* bugs.
But if whenever they can't open the file and the software doesn't tell
them what the reason really is (i.e., provide a wrong reason so that
it misleads the user into trying out useless or even impossible
things), then it is a bug.
strategy to discourage people to report bugs because most users
didn't know what a bug is, and when you are a company you cannot
spend your time (your money) to track such things. So doing this way,
you can hope that only developers may do reports, and then it is
reasonable to think about treating them as peers (only "thinking
about" because developers are sometimes just end-users).
Are we talking about bugreport.apple.com or the feedback form here?
That bugreport form *already* assumes that you are a developer. No
"user" (read the clueless kind) will use that form if it requires a
developer's account to sign on.
--
cheers,
-ambrose
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