My complaint is not directed at MX 2004, but customer service at MM.
They do not handle physical shipment satisfactory. I paid for express deliveries, but it still took several weeks to get physical shipments. When complaining, it took days to answer my E-mails.
But in all fairness, the MX2004 CD was shipped promptly.

Bjørn.

I want to add another comment to the "not responding". This refers to an email I sent in shock when I discovered the renewal for Silver Support had increased from $500 last year to $2400 this year. When I called Macromedia, the customer service rep abruptly told me it was a "marketing decision to increase it" and to send an email to Macromedia. I sent a long email and have never received any response.

<b>Silence of the lame</b>
Having contacted macromedia about faulty software, and other "non support" stuff i only got silence. Email is NEVER EVER RESPONDED TO. What arrogance!..

I am convinsed that all email is handled by a routine that sends them directly to the waste bin. Only by "threatening" them throght a letter to Computer Arts did they finaly respond.

They should by now have gathered that this is not the road to travel for them - not that they have to give free support - but they MUST reply to any serious email regarding their product - especially now where they have killed most of their free info/support/evangelising outlets.

<font face='Arial'>If MM is turning it's back on us customers...the question is, are there any good tools such as MX2004 out there you can relly on? I'd love to give it a try if you can recommend 1 as good as or better than MX2004.
I'm shure MM would reconsider it's customer strategy once we move on to a better software provider</font id='Arial'>

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>
<font face='Arial'>If MM is turning it's back on us customers...the question is, are there any good tools such as MX2004 out there you can relly on? I'd love to give it a try if you can recommend 1 as good as or better than MX2004.
I'm shure MM would reconsider it's customer strategy once we move on to a better software provider</font id='Arial'>
<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>

www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/newfeatures.html

I'm going to keep my eyes on this.

Folks, no one's turning their back on customers here. But keeping on top of every discussion in every corner of the web can be difficult. For example, the only way into these particular forums is thru the 'interview' link- there's little to no activity on the main DMXzones forums?

To answer (or at least try to address) a few of the comments here:

- No, we can't answer every private email sent in. Volumes even on a QUIET day are staggering. We do consider everything that comes in very seriously, however. It's just a physical impossibility to answer every bit of email that comes in, sorry.

- Have you posted on the official MM forums with these same issues? It's very hard to quantify anonymous posters across the various sites (many of whom are often the same person with multiple identities), but we watch and respond rather quickly on our own site. That being said, I'm sure several if not many of you have posted there- but we can't tell as the names are always different depending on the day/forum/mood/etc. (ajy- your nick looks familiar, tho)

- Can't comment directly on the support costs- not exactly within my scope of influence (to say the least), but points taken.

- Enkidu- I'm not sure if you've gotten specific 'arrogant' responses from MM in the past, but any lack of response you may have seen is far less due to arrogance and more due to above-noted traffic/volume issues. If not, could you give some specific cases?

Bottom line is that we are listening, even if you haven't received direct responses from emails you've sent.

-Scott
Macromedia, Inc.

- Scott

scott fegette
macromedia, inc.

Great to hear from you MM <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>

I have posted in the forums under the same handle over time - just so you know.

A specific case - shure - i have one you should be abble to dig out even if its a bit old. But it was a lengthy process - so it must have created some paperwork.

Buying UD1 for mac i found out it couldnt create a connection to a javaserver as described in the manual. I thought i was plain dumb, but after spending several thounsands of dollars getting an expert to set up my server and program (an almost exact copy of what i have done) following the description in the manual - he tried quite a few tricks only to find out that it didnt work.

This was getting irritating AND expensive.

Contacting (trying to most of the time) us offices via phone (which is expensive and troublesome from denmark) i got a negative response - something like "you must be dumb or what).

After many many calls - they redirected me to the english office where i talked to someone i think was named thomas - somthing starting with a "t".

After months he must have found out that UD couldnt do what it stated it could and they offered me a sidegrade to pc version . I didnt want to spend even more money for a pc workstation i just wanted a product that could do what the package said it would.

Luckily for MM UD4 came out and i got a new copy for free - a sad compensation for the many months and dollars and had spend - and the many hours on the phone for that matter.

It was hard just to be regarded as an irritation pain in the but - when i actually love the products and only want to se them getting better.

I have mailed the list of actual bugs i found in dreamweaver mx (im a registered user) but no response. MM put out a bug"fix" that actually didnt deal with any of them - leaving the dmx on the mac a poor copy of its pc "brother".

DMX is not fixed yet - but finally i decided to upgrade anyhow - fearing that it is as buggy as its former version - fearing that any reports i send in on any bugs i come accross - will only be responded to in new "versions" of the program.

Please, MM/scott, tell us that you will actually FIX the bugs that come up BEFORE new releases - then we would feel comfortable in spending/depending on you guys.

Remember we like your product - and should be considered on YOUR team.

Regards
and thanx for taking the time to respond!!!

Gunni Grahn alias Enkidu

Edited by - enkidu on 26 Oct 2003 14:35:15

Hey, Gunni (and all)!

On the subject of us always shipping 'bug-free' software, the best I can say is that we do take the stability and quality of our apps very seriously- but it eventually comes down to a fine balance of resources. I'm not certain a balance can ever be struck between fixing every reported issue and keeping the products cutting-edge and competitive in the marketplace that would make all parties happy, but we do listen (even if we disagree on some of the details!) and tough resource decisions such as these are never made lightly.

Now on the note of Mac development, all I can really say is that the platform is definitely not a 'poor copy of it's PC brother' here. And I'd generally note that optimization on Macs can be very time-consuming, especially given the fact that our products are not native Cocoa apps (which are in most cases far easier to optimize than Carbonized apps). Yep, we are looking into this specifically, you'll note that it's one of the top 'emerging issues'.

www.macromedia.com/support/dreamweaver/ts/documents/emerging_issues.htm

(definitely would recommend taking the performance survey noted in that technote- it greatly helps corral the relevant info for the engineers to act upon- thx in advance!)

For what it's worth, the issue of general performance on Macs has always been a very environmentally-specific issue. For example, I currently use a dual 500 G4 desktop, reasonably basic setup, and to be honest I've had little-to-no problems with DWMX2004. Honest truth? My main problems with it would be:

- Often need to hit F5 (refresh design view) when working in the code pane of 'split view'.
- Typing in design view can be slow in nested/complex table layouts (it's much faster to type in code pane/view, however)
- Horizontal scrolling in code view is pretty slow, especially with big windows (although this also seems to be the case with some other apps, so I'm not sure that isn't more of a global issue).

Yep- we use the applications too. And I know we're all on the same team- but can really just make you a basic promise- while I'm around you can ask me anything. Please do. Just realize that I won't be able to answer certain questions due to various reasons (disclosure, lack of information, etc.) but if I can, you'll always get the straight story from me.

Hope this helps- and again, thanks for the feedback! We do take it seriously.


- Scott

scott fegette
macromedia, inc.

Thanx again Scott for the answers - you really seem to care about "your baby" which is down right great.

Ill take the offer on asking you when something of general interest comes up.

i have posted copies of the latest issues i have send to MM (You guessed it - under bugs) and i it would be great if our sysop would collect the reported bugs in a list - so we all could compare it to MM "emerging issues" list.

Just for the record - i run a 17" powerbook with one gig of memory - allways updated with the latest from apple and MM.

(found something strange today - the REFRESH header function is gone?? i have removed everything relating to old versions and performed an install in SAFE SYSTEM mode- but its not there. The manual says its supposed to bee where it has allways been - under HEADER - but its gone?!?!)

Quote

- Typing in design view can be slow in nested/complex table layouts (it's much faster to type in code pane/view, however)

This is not a 'minor' issue... This is major. I downloaded the trial and this was SO bad, I couldn't use it. I'm a long time user, very loyal, but I didn't see enough improvements in the software to put up with this and the few other problems I had. I'm upgrading my machine in a few weeks and will probably try it again... but at this price (and as frequently as the upgrades are coming now - especially being so staggered) I will probably wait.

Cheryl Floyed

Talica Designs

Work like you don't need money,
Love like you've never been hurt,
Dance like nobody's watching.

Fair enough- personal experience is what's important for such decisions, Cheryl.

For what it's worth, live edits to complex tables have never been fast enough for me, either on Mac or Windows (I rather adjusted to that back during DW 4 or so). Obviously we'll continue to work at speeding things up, if you post a sample page of the layout that particularly gives you problems that would be handy (to get an idea of exactly how complex/bulky the table is in the first place).

Also (FWIW), there was around 18 months between the release of MX and MX 2004, that seems to be a reasonably standard cycle for the industry.




- Scott

scott fegette
macromedia, inc.