Warpstock 99 - Atlanta, October 16-17, 1999
         Two fun filled days of OS/2 and YOU!
Registration discount has been extended to October 14th!
   Visit http://www.warpstock.org for full details             

Source: Thorsten Thielen (thth@gmx.net)
Moderator: Christopher B. Wright (wrightc@dtcweb.com)
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- New version 1.04 given only minor chances in next contest -

Release 1.00 of Wanda, the free sticky notes program for OS/2, has just
been rated "3rd buggiest Program of the Year" by a jury of selected
members of Team OS/2 Region Trier e.V.

Wanda 1.00's bug list includes such gems like:
- Hiding a note from menu did not work
- Strange Icons appeared when changing titlebar of minimized notes
- Titles of minimized notes were not showing in notelist
- Linefeeds were in bad format when printing/outputting notes
- The whole program closed down when only closing a note was desired
- The Wordwrap conditional cascade menu did not work
- The program crashed when an empty note was to be saved
- Autosave did save all n seconds, not only n seconds after the last 
  change
- Closing notes or the notelist from the window list did not work

Place two is occupied by an elephantine office suite package originally
by a german firm while place one is held, as in all contests of the
past fifteen years, by a DOS-based program starter from a large
computer company, residing in Redmond, Oregon, that wants to stay
annonymous.

"We would have made place two with no problems but for our good e-mail
support and the fact that Wanda is freely available; this two things,
though not actually related to the rating criteria, did cost us a lot
of points." said Thorsten Thielen, the author of Wanda. "The
forthcoming replacement of the free e-mail support by our newly opened
$180.00 per hour phone hotline and the restriction of the fee-less use
of Wanda to owners of Commodore 64 and Apple IIe computers hopefully
will give us a better stand in the next run."

Though the new version 1.04 has already been released, it is not given
much chances by experts: a representative of this contest's second
winner explains: "Wanda's high rating was only a matter of sheer luck,
as the new version is definitly less buggy than v1.00. The new version
actually has a large number of bugs *fixed*! obviously in a vain
attempt to make room for other, more sophisticated ones. Also labeling
the release a "beta version" was only done to fool users into believing
the program to be more buggy and unstable than it actually is. A second
thing you should note is that Wanda is a program written for OS/2 and,
as everybody with a bit of experience knows, OS/2 is rather not a good
platform for writing buggy programs."

B.G., leader of above mentioned big software company adds: "Writing
buggy programs is a science at least, if not an art; you can't just
write bad code and hope it crashes or misfunctions. There is a limit on
the number of bugs that you can squeeze into a given number of lines of
sourcecode, and when this limit is reached, it will not be possible to
make the program buggier, except by adding new code. Our company has
been producing buggy programs for almost two decades now and we're
already pretty close to this threshold, so we already keep adding as
much code as possible, and this way managed to keep every new version
of our software at least a bit more buggy than the previous one."

Users that want to make up their own opinon may download Wanda v1.04
from either the homepage
(http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/CIP/thielen/wanda/) or from the
wellknown Hobbes archive site (http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/incoming
or http://hobbes.nmsu.edu/pub/os2/util/wps (later))


bye
Thorsten Thielen
(Schriftfuehrer+Webmaster Team OS/2 Region Trier e.V.)

Visit us at http://www.teamos2.ipcon.de or
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/CIP/thielen/teamos2



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