A Testing Experience

I am somehow inclined to regularly download and test the latest version of SOHO Notes. It doesn't take much to move me to action: an html announcement from Chronos, a mea culpa email about SOHO technical support, the introduction of NoteLife. I constantly venture over to MacUpdate to check out the star ratings of the product. Would the rating still be two and a half stars out of five? At version 8.09, most of the v8 release bugs should have been eradicated.

Alas no. Two and a half stars it was. And holding. More negative chatter. I would not let this negativity dissuade me.

So this morning, I once again navigated to the Chronos site and re-downloaded v8.09 of SOHO Notes. I convinced myself that I was going to stick it out this time; I was going to help Chronos as a self-described Macintosh evangelist. Sort of an Apple software medic.

I decided my first Notes writing assignment would be to create a Crash Record. I thought this might be insightful for me (perhaps looking for patterns in my own work would be helpful to Chronos too). I fired up a new blank pages document, titled it SOHO Notes Crash Report, added a three column, multi-row table, then closed the note. And SOHO crashed.

Being a dedicated Chronos supporter, I dutifully copied out the SOHO details from the error report with the expectation of copying this into my very first crash report table entry. I reloaded Notes, opened my SOHO Notes Crash Report document, and, using a Notes shortcut, entered today's date in the second row's first cell. But that date refused to stay in the cell - preferring to paste itself in the third cell of the first row - The title row. I deleted the recalcitrant pasting and tried again. No success. For some reason, the date wanted to cuddle up inside the first row's third cell. In addition, the top two rows' cells resized themselves into a crazy quilt of disordered formatting. Thank goodness for Command Z.

Being a highly dedicated Chronos supporter, I thought "Okay, operator error, I'll fix this." So, like a football referee, I decided to jump into the middle of six misshapen table cells to sort them out. And then SOHO Notes crashed.

Being a fanatically dedicated Chronos supporter, I did what I always so. I removed the product and all shreds of it's tenancy from my MacBook Pro and dragged these to my trash bin. Unfortunately, SOHO Notes seems to be more at home there then in my applications folder. Kudos, as always, to Apple for making the elimination of non-performing software so dreadfully easy.

So. . . being the frightfully dedicated Chronos supporter, I fully expect to yet again download the next version of Notes - be it v8.10, 8.11, 10.11, or 20.11 - and check it out. I have faith in the company that one day in the not too distant future - as long as aluminum is still readily available, Chronos will provide the Mac community with a blessedly bug-free SOHO Notes.

After all, I am a dedicated Chronos supporter.