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The Bat: Great program, terrible documentation and support

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superboyac:
I just tried version 5 beta.  Just as I suspected.  There are NO attempts to fix anything that most people would notice.  Seriously, I don't think anyone can tell the difference between version 3 and version 5.

So MicroEd, that fantastic text editor that is supposed to be the greatest thing in the world, well, same old annoyances still exist.  For example, microed has the following options:
Automatic Wrapping
Automatic Formatting

I turn both of those one.  I paste a paragraph into Microed, and what does it look like?  See below:


So that's automatic wrapping and/or formatting?  So to get that to look like a normal paragraph, I have to do the stupid Alt-L thing, and I get:


And finally, to get it to look normal, I have to scroll to the left:


So my question is, what are the developers doing?  I mean, are we ever going to be able to fix the basics.  Stuff like the editor, manual, etc.?  Shouldn't they address those before adding some weird little feature for a particular template thing or whatever they are doing?

skwire:
I'm going to guess that auto-wrap and auto-format are not designed to work with pasted blocks of text.  My email client is the same way but it doesn't bother me.  I just highlight, hit one hotkey and it's formatted.  No big deal.

superboyac:
I'm going to guess that auto-wrap and auto-format are not designed to work with pasted blocks of text.  My email client is the same way but it doesn't bother me.  I just highlight, hit one hotkey and it's formatted.  No big deal.
-skwire (January 31, 2011, 10:41 AM)
--- End quote ---
yes, but why can't they just fix it?  Why add an auto-wrapping feature and do a half-ass job of it.  So by adding an auto-wrap feature, they are basically saying, "well, it auto-wraps for some things, and not for others".  They should call it "automatic wrapping sometimes".

Ah...screw Microed.  I'm just going to use the windows plain text editor mode.  The only thing i like about microed is that the color formatting that's automatic gets applied as you type.  In Windows mode, sometimes the formatting doesn't work all that well.

skwire:
yes, but why can't they just fix it?-superboyac (January 31, 2011, 10:45 AM)
--- End quote ---

In my case, I like that my client doesn't auto-format pasted blocks because there are plenty of times I don't want the pasted block formatted.

superboyac:
Let's see what the bat's customer service is like:

So that means about 1200 feature requests have been made, and less than 200 of them have even been looked at.  Same goes for just the other items below it.  it seems like they just close issues without doing much.  This program seriously has not changed much over the years.  Anything they modify or fix are tiny little things here and there, such as:
"The main improvement of the new version is a significant speed up of message retrieving via POP3 servers".
Oh yay!  So they will fix that, but not the editor, which is what all users are dealing with 90% of the time while on the Bat.  It's basically the heart of the program.  it's email, after all, what else are you doing other than reading/writing emails?!


By the way, on their website in the news, I found the following quotes:
RITLabs had proven its supremacy once again
--- End quote ---
Supremacy in what exactly?  Yes, it's a great email program.  But it's hardly popular or even recognizable by most people.  I'm sure making it a little easier to use with a manual and good support would make that statement a little more true.

Early 2010 for RITLabs is rich in innovations. Freshly launched The Bat! 4.2.23 brings quite a number of improvements and fixes.
--- End quote ---
Oh yeah?  What could they be?  let's take a look:
01/26/2010
[+] "Do nothing" option for the "Watch and send files" Scheduler's action to control execution of other actions
[*] Improved speed of handling folder names. This may be noticeable on very large folder trees
[*] Changed DEP detection algorithm for the operating systems prior to Windows Vista (e.g. for Windows XP with SP3 and Windows Server 2003)
[*] If there were an invalid birthday date stored in the address book, The Bat! did only report error "invalid argument to date encode", without further clarification for the user what might have caused the error. Now more detailed information is given.
[-] Clicking the "How to register" menu item have caused the "File not found" error message
[-] (#0007845) Error Message when exiting "save as" in Graphic Viewer
[-] (#0007852) An error after dropping a dragged attachment to a Windows desktop
[-] The Certificate Selection window and Certificate Search Results windows did save the coordinates to a wrong location in Registry
[-] (#0007844) Font family not set in HTML mail
[-] (#0007859) After renaming an account, folder structure is not saved
--- End quote ---
Great.

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