Games Etc

[Cas]

Hi


Do developers actually test their pnds thoroughly before they are put out ?


I have since having my Pandora had several that do not work at all


the most recent problems being with Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.


Now another two, Lemmings crashes all over the place, and Angband only


ever worked once now refuses to go beyond the loading screen.


Copies of emulators on the what is meant to be the official Apps site that do


not even show in the Minimenu etc


Web browsers that are little more than useless.


All this cannot be good for the Pandora and to joe public this is not good.


I think these developers are doing the Pandora no good at all.


The man on the street is not going to want to go into terminals changing fonts


settings etc to get things to work. I consider myself to have a small amount of


knowledge after playing around with other handhelds and I am struggling and


getting more and more ticked off with it all.


EDIT:


Do developers test their pnds thoroughly before they are put out ?


I have since having my Pandora had several that do not work at all.


I consider myself to have a small amount of knowledge after playing around


with other handhelds and I am struggling.

 

[darfgarf]

so you're pissed off with developers for not testing code they write/port fully, i'm going to assume you have no idea how much effort is put in by everyone to make things work teh best they can, with no feedback other than 'this sucks, it crashed' which is certainly less than helpful


so quit bitching at a great bunch of poeple that work their arses off for free

 

[Scntrblob]

I guess every pnd you spit at has a thread here or over there on gp32x.de - so why don't you just report the crashes where they get the attention of their maintainers?

All this cannot be good for the Pandora and to joe public this is not good.
I think these developers are doing the Pandora no good at all.

What's you ordernumb... ahem, housenumber?

 

[(naw)mcx]

Web browsers that are little more than useless.

You have tried Midori, the latest version of Midori. I've heard good things about Lightweight2, and ELinks. Firefox is good, just a little buggy at the moment - but the pandora is young, we can fix these things!


On the whole not working note - i've found PNDs downloaded straight from the Pandora's browser work much better than ones transferred from my PC. ymmv.

 

[FaeMinx]

I'm sure I read somewhere that the format of the drive you first save the PND to makes a difference - apparently FAT32 isn't the best for PND compatibility. I assumed that was the reason so many of my apps don't show up in the menu, don't run, or crash. At present I have no way to go online with my Pandora so I'm going to have to live without those apps until I can... Most do work though - and every PND was downloaded to my laptop first.


But someone please correct me on this.

 

[Blue Protoman]

I've had very few issues with PNDs on my FAT32-formatted card. Only ones that didn't load (wouldn't they be fine after loading?) were PNDStore and Code:blocks.

 

[BaDToaD]

I've got to say this Cas. Maybe you should sell you pandora and buy a 3DS...

 

[Caine]

Do developers actually test their pnds before they are put them out ?

Do you truly believe that they do not? We have an entire section on these boards dedicated to that. However, testing does not show the absence of bugs, only the presence.


As said by others, if you run into issues then notify the developer of the application of the bug and if possible with a method to reproduce it. Keep in mind that you have bought an open-source handheld for homebrew software and therefore developers are working on the software in their spare time. This limits resources and requires users to take an active role in testing the software.

 

[Scntrblob]

What do you guys have problems with? The only pnd that didn't work for me was RoadFighter, others didn't make problems.


Not showing up in the menus is probably occured by invalid categories in the pxml. In XFCE those should pop up in "Other"....

 

[Mr_Loon]

Cas, I can understand your frustration, but you need to step back and look at the bigger picture. The Pandora has a current user base of less than 3000. Can you point to another device with a user base of 100,000 that had even half as much quality software as the Pandora within a year of its launch.


It never ceases to amaze me the amount of effort, love and attention put in by the devs / porters of the Pandora community. They do it for no financial gain and little glory.


Some things are rough around the edges, none too user friendly or a little bit buggy but there are many examples of incredibly slick & useful software.


The community as a whole could help the devs a lot by commenting upon and rating apps.


Sorry to sound like a rabid Pandora fanboy, but I guess that's what I am.

 

[foxblock]

While I can understand your frustration, I cannot understand the way you are putting it out here.


This does not help anyone and at the same time it probably did not get you the responses you had hoped for.


When a PND does not work, talk to the dev. You can easily find who is responsible on the page you downloaded it. We are a close community, nobody will mind if you send a PM and otherwise nearly every app has a thread here in which you can post, too.


If you don't know how to submit a proper crash report, feel free to ask. Mention the app crashed and maybe tell what you did and the dev will tell you the steps to get the data he (or she) needs to reconstruct and fix the problem.


The dev will be glad you did as he did not notice the bug in the first place and you will be happy when you got a working app after all.


That is the good thing about this community, we are few, but we are close - take advantage of it!


Yes it takes some effort, but after all, this is what the Pandora is _really_ about and if you cannot take those 5 minutes off and expect any app to work flawlessly out of the box, then you clearly have the wrong expectations in the Pandora.


Just shouting "this crap does not work" (even if it is true) does not help anyone, just as shouting at the people shouting "crap" does not help anyone.

 

[WizardStan]

Do developers actually test their pnds thoroughly before they are put out ?

Yes. They are then put into the beta testing section of the board, and now onto the repo with a beta tag for users to test. Beta means unstable, you've got to expect bugs, and in turn you're expected to report those bugs to the developer so they can make it better, because honestly, no one person can test everything, at least not with something sufficiently complex.


A lot of beta software was also copied into the official apps.openpandora.org site, against the original developers wishes, so be wary of some of those.


But yeah, as others have said, you have to make the devs aware of any problems you have, ways that you reproduced them, those kinds of things. You could be doing something which seems perfectly normal to you, but the dev didn't think of, resulting in a crash.


I have no idea what your problems with the web browsers are. Chromium-dev has caused me some problems (especially with gmail and other google app sites), but Firefox and Midori have never failed me (not entirely true, I found clicking one specific button in a contrived set of circumstances caused Midori to crash, it was weird. Also firefox eats ram like candy, so can't use more than a couple of tabs, but whatever) but that's why chromium-dev is dev: it's in development. Technically I think Firefox and Midori are still listed as beta, but they work pretty good.


Never had a problem with Lemmings either. A case of you might be doing something unexpected that seems perfectly natural to you, or may an issue with your data files, or who knows. Can't begin to solve the problem unless you make the dev aware there even is a problem. The other two apps you list I've not used yet, so no idea whether they behave well or not.

 

[skeezix]

Use the repo or wiki, its probably much more updated than 'apps' which tends to be out of date. Theyv'e got someone doing uploading now, but they tend not top update old files, and dont' follow everything, and generally trail the other repos.


But yes, some pnds are actually poop -- some devs did a quick port, checked it work3ed for them,a nd moved on.. never making sure it worked for anyone else; or maybe they did a quick job and didn't do it 'properly'. Theres not many of those, but there are some for sure. (or guy who didn't add a documentation link into the pnd, but it requires cryptixc setup... doh For instance, one I keep meaning to bug the dev about is Powder.. it was packaged badly, but it 'sort of runs' in xrfce, but not at all well in mmenu; but it really doesn't work well at all, but it 'looks like it does', so the dev moved on.. but really never tested it. Just one of those things.


In general, most pnds are drag and drop, they just work; the system works well But a few bad eggs..


jeff

 

[Poem58]

I have the same problem on My Acer Laptop running Windows 7. I used CdBurnerXP which worked with my laptop drive for 3 burns then suddenly could no longer see it. I hooked up my old HP cd Burner via USB-IDE adaptor and it could see it. Now CDBurnerXP is free, the fault was with this software for sure as nothing else had failed on my laptop, I even saw others had complained of the exact same issue, except not one of us could usefully explain what would cause such a thing and the developer had yet to see it and therefore could not figure out what was happening, so no fix was to be in the works.


Funny enough I tried to use CDBurnerXP after a couple of months to rip a disc to an image, and it saw my drive again, for no apparent reason. So who should I blame? The developer of CdBurnerXP, Acer, or Microsoft and what would that gain me?


All I am saying is when you are dealing with software someone makes for free, there is no implied warranty of usefulness. Things go wrong, and while the Pandora has the advantage of being the same unit and therefore compatibility issues would be minimized, we have people using different hotfixes and even different compiled OS's. there's bound to be issues for people. In time it will work itself out. As others said, best to share the bug, and hope for a fix. Making it sound like the Dev's are doing bad things, comes off ungrateful and does nothing to help motivate them or others to do things for us of their own free time and effort.

 

[ckblackm]

Funny enough I tried to use CDBurnerXP after a couple of months to rip a disc to an image, and it saw my drive again, for no apparent reason. So who should I blame? The developer of CdBurnerXP, Acer, or Microsoft and what would that gain me?

Always blame Microsoft... it makes things just seem right.

 

[Prometheus]

I think these developers are doing the Pandora no good at all.

Indeed. How dare they spend their free time creating software that they then release to us at no charge - that's no good for the Pandora at all.


Alright, seriously, no disrespect, but we have a Support section here, and you don't appear to have raised any of these issues in there. That would be a good start (in addition to letting the developers know, as others have suggested) - after all, we're all here to help each other out with things like this, right?


There are several things that could be causing issues, and in cases where others are not encountering the same issues, it may not be the PNDs but your SD Cards, changes you've made to the system, or any number of other things.

 

[ahahah]

I've got to say this Cas. Maybe you should sell you pandora and buy a 3DS...

it is the only help you will propose to all buyers that will have issues...?


how to not have the sentiment to be abandonned after 2 years of waiting for this answer. what a disappointment.


i have not received my pandora yet, but i prepare to have also some issues.


i wish i will not receive this kind of answers...

 

[ChaosWarmech]

I've got to say this Cas. Maybe you should sell you pandora and buy a 3DS...

it is the only help you will propose to all buyers that will have issues...?


how to not have the sentiment to be abandonned after 2 years of waiting for this answer. what a disappointment.


i have not received my pandora yet, but i prepare to have also some issues.


i wish i will not receive this kind of answers...

It's quite easy to get legitimate help on these forums. Simply ask for help in a respectable and polite manner. DON'T insult the developers because of your own lack of ability; like cas has done here.


Cas deserves every bit of negativity he's receiving.

 

[Cas]

I've got to say this Cas. Maybe you should sell you pandora and buy a 3DS...

it is the only help you will propose to all buyers that will have issues...?


how to not have the sentiment to be abandonned after 2 years of waiting for this answer. what a disappointment.


i have not received my pandora yet, but i prepare to have also some issues.


i wish i will not receive this kind of answers...

It's quite easy to get legitimate help on these forums. Simply ask for help in a respectable and polite manner. DON'T insult the developers because of your own lack of ability; like cas has done here.


Cas deserves every bit of negativity he's receiving.

One last post before I go......


So it seems that if you say it how it is you get ridiculed here, well I am sorry I am not part of the inner sanctum and have


not been accepted into the community, well you can stick your community up your arse as far as I am concerned.


EDIT : Sorry to not have the technical knowledge or Linux knowledge that most here seem to have, seems that is what you need here to be accepted.

 

[DaMummy]

obvious troll is obvious. either way, let us know what you need help with