AirVenture Schedule

[gbrasch]

Hal, I am sure you are getting tired of all these "suggestions", so bear with me. In past years when scrolling through the forum schedules, the times always showed. This year they do not, unless you open up the program description. I find this somewhat awkward, but don't know if you can fix it or not. Just my .2 cents. Glenn

[Hal Bryan]

Hal, I am sure you are getting tired of all these "suggestions", so bear with me. In past years when scrolling through the forum schedules, the times always showed. This year they do not, unless you open up the program description. I find this somewhat awkward, but don't know if you can fix it or not. Just my .2 cents. Glenn

Glenn - Here's how it will look in the next update. This build is awaiting Apple's approval now. What do you think?

[N222AB]

Much better. I, too, was not happy with times being omitted.

[gbrasch]

Glenn - Here's how it will look in the next update. This build is awaiting Apple's approval now. What do you think?

Great!

[rleffler]

Hal,

I'm getting data update notifications about every ten minutes on my iPhone. Are they really releasing data updates that frequently?

bob

[Hal Bryan]

Hal,

I'm getting data update notifications about every ten minutes on my iPhone. Are they really releasing data updates that frequently?

bob

Hi Bob -

Sorry about that - the short answer is "yes." We had an issue with the update mechanism over the last few days, so today was the first day we could update in a while, and there were 2 or 3 of us scrambling to get things caught up all at once - I'm afraid we didn't do a good job of communicating in-house about who was going to push the button when.

There will undoubtedly be other periods like this here and there over the next couple weeks, but we will do a better job of being more disciplined about when we trigger the update - our goal is no more than twice a day, unless it's something really pressing, so please bear with us.

Thanks!

Hal

[rleffler]

Thanks, I just wanted to check to ensure it was real data updates and not an application defect. As an IT guy, I'm used to providing feedback during the pre-production phase of software roll outs.

[N222AB]

I've done an update three times in the last couple of hours to make sure I had the right update, but I'm still not seeing the times on the forums list. Is this still in a yet unreleased update?

[rleffler]

I've done an update three times in the last couple of hours to make sure I had the right update, but I'm still not seeing the times on the forums list. Is this still in a yet unreleased update?

Hal mentioned that will come with an application update, which hasn't come from from Apple yet.

[Howard Handelman]

I am sorry to be negative and critical, but in my "career" I did (and managed) a lot of application development and I still teach computers on a volunteer basis. I think I'm qualified to make these observations and recommendations.

1. The performance of the web application is dialup speed when adding to my itinerary. I hate to imagine why so I won't speculate. When it finally says it added to my itinerary there is no obvious way to return to where I was in the list. Yes, I know that a simple "back" works, but good application design does not hide navigation.
2. I can't find a way to print the entire schedule or a query result. Personally, I would not do that, but my friend Jack Norris asked me how to do it and I could not.
3. The search is not working very well. I could not find anything under Jack's last name or "propellers" or "propellors" and yet there are four forums with that last name, two from Jack and two from Joe. The iPhone app finds them. There are even more with the prop subject.
4. The iPhone app is much better but I see from the comments above that it has issues, too. That app appears to come from Sporty's and I welcome their assistance but EAA should do better on their official site. This is not rocket science or even aerodynamics.
5. The "old" application also mentioned above does not seem to be accessing all of the same data. I can't begin to think why but I don't think that is how it should be. If it doesn't work it should not be on the web and if it is supposed to work then it should work correctly. There should be only one database that these programs are creating queries for.

For me, the bottom line contains these summary recommendations:
1. EAA should do a better job of defining the requirements for the user interface before even starting to develop the app. Then it should, before releasing it, check if those requirements were met.
2. EAA should use basic IT engineering such that the performance of the web application is not so slow as to suggest to the user that something is broken.
3. EAA should use basic IT quality control to ensure that anything that should not be seen is not seen. This means having a good development environment with development, test and "production" environments. Only the production environment should be visible to the public. Last year's stuff should be deleted if it is not supposed to be there.
4. The search function should default to full text on title, presenter and subject at a bare minimum. Or if you want more work, do it like my mail program and offer choices how to narrow it. Returning too much is better than not returning anything.

Again, sorry to be so negative but EAA usually has better standards and it certainly should.
hh

Edit: This time, the search on "norris" and "Norris" worked as it should. Earlier tonight it did not.
BTW, Avast is saying it is blocking two infections on this site: some kind of "client script". It is a Java Script issue. That is very rare on this OS X system. Might be worth a look, yes?