Flash Team

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Subject : Why a simple fix is not always so simple : Or Why is the Find Panel Still Modal!

I wanted to write up a description of a particular issue which I think demonstrates why something that seems simple to fix / change is not always so simple. Part of the reason I am writing this is to give some context to how we decide what we can fix at this stage in the beta, but also because this was the first time I have been directly involved in the decision making process.

First, some background. At this point in Ellipsis, we are really focusing on fixing any issues caused by changes made in Ellipsis. However, the team is very committed to making this a very relevant release for users, so if there is a bug or pain point that:

1. affects a lot of users
2. does not risk / touch a lot of the code base

then we will look at it (there should be some pleasant surprises with the next beta release).

So, yesterday the issue of the Find Window being modal came up. In case you didn't read the thread, the issue is that when you open the Find Panel for the ActionScript editor, it is modal, meaning that you cannot change / edit the text in the editor while the Find Window is open. This is inconsistent with other Text Editors, and to put it frankly, is rather annoying.

So, I saw the posts about it yesterday. I thought it would be something very simple to fix (just flip a Flag on the Window so it is non-modal). Based on this, and the input from the list, we decided to look into:

1. how easy (code wise) it would be to fix the problem
2. how risky the fix would be (would it affect code that affects other parts of the app)
3. would it cause any new usability issues.

So, the issue was sent to the management team (includes product management, heads of engineering, QA and IMD(documentation)), with a suggestion that we look into this. Everyone agreed, and the head of engineering asked an engineer to look into the issue. It looked like it would be an easy fix, and an easy win for users (which is a win for us).

So, the first item that came up was actually usability related. There were concerns that it would be confusing to users if the Find Panel was open but the ActionScript editor had been closed. What should the panel do if the user clicks find then? What if they keep the panel open, but open a new frame of ActionScript? We looked at how other programs handled this (Visual Studio, EditPlus and Notepad), and determined that this would not affect many users, and that the other programs have similar issues.

So, the engineer then looked into how easy and risky it would be from a code standpoint to make the change. It turned out, that in order to make it non-modal, we couldn't just flip a Flag, but rather had to call a new method. Ok, a little more risky, but not that big of a deal.

After further investigation, we discovered that we would actually have to change the window type, which in essence would mean we would have to reprogram the Window. Again, not yet that risky, but now we are getting into more significant changes.

Finally, and the straw that broke the camels back, we found out that we would have to completely rewrite how the Find panel actually finds data. This is because currently, when you open the Find Panel, it takes a snapshot of the text in ActionScript editor (since the user won't be able to change it). I am not sure why it is done like this, but do know that it is faster than dynamically loading the text each time and keeping the cursor position each time.

Changing how the Find Panel searches text is big code change and risky. Furthermore, making the change could now lead to significant performance decreases when searching large amounts of text. These factors combined to make the change too risky for Ellipsis, and we deferred it to the next version of Flash (at which time we are basically re-writing all panel and window code).

Anyways, I just wanted to share this with the list to give some context to why something that may seem simple, doesn't get fixed for Ellipsis. This was an issue that I thought would be very simple for us to fix, but it turned out to be a lot more complicated and risky than I expected.

Again, this isn't to justify why the Find Panel is modal, but rather to give some context to how we determine what additional things we can fix at this stage.

mike chambers

mesh@macromedia.com
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Hope that helps put some context around how we make decisions on individual issues and requests, and show how something that seems simple can ending of being pretty complex (for any number of reasons).

Btw, the issue described above is something that we are now looking at for 8Ball.