James Sapara’s Personal Blog

I take it in,
And feel myself rush forward,
Through a self discovery gateway,
A portal to my own destiny.

I hold in it,
I savor the exhilaration of moving,
The constant flow I’m caught in,
The ebbing flow of life.

I let go,
My perspective widens,
My appreciation broadens,
I do it again.

Well I got an email today with an update on the “progress” of the loft development. Apparently we’re delayed even more now. Possession will apparently be March now. We’ve gone from November to March now. I’ve seen new condo buildings built this year in less time… what gives?

At work I’ve been using the newest and greatest Install Shield Premier 2008 for packing aforementioned Visual Basic application. We actually had version 10.5 sitting around, but somehow I managed to change the dependencies for this application is such a way that it confused the heck out of the 10.5 version. Now, I’m coming from a unique perspective here, in that I’ve attempted to use 10.5 and 2008. Here are my “Install Shield Grips”:

• The difference between MSI project types is nearly meaningless. “Basic MSI” can only literally handle just a straight up wizard created project. Anything remotely useful requires you to migrate to the InstallScript related projects. My point here, why even bother having it as an option.
• Documentation included within the app is sparse at best. Documentation online is marginally better. $250 manuals, ever so slightly more useful than online docs. Would it kill them to keep these manuals up to date as well? I’ve already come across a few cases where the manual for 2008 does not reflect changes made since 12.
• Complete lack of a useful Dialog building GUI. Was an issue in 10.5 and still is an issue in 2008. Seriously people, if you going to charge that much for your product… give me something I can actually see as an improvement.
• Did I mention the entire interface for the application has basically remained the same? Well it has, all the slow loading pages and forms are still here in 2008.
• Want to test custom script actions? You’ll have to rebuild your who MSI project to do that. In my case that’s a 20 minute or so wait between tests.
• They have this nifty feature called release flags, but fail to implement it everywhere it could be useful. Results in you hacking the install scripts to get behaviors based on the release flag anyways.
• Skinning support is poor to horrible. Let’s not forget that it’s documentation is poor as well, making it all that more entertaining to use.

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