This must be my Lucky Day!
I bought & installed CintaNotes just ten days ago, so am new to it; so far I've just been "messing around" with it, to learn it, before trying to use it seriously.
Several days ago, I noticed an oddity -- IE had switched to Work Offline mode all by itself. Odd, but not a biggie. I must have closed IE shortly thereafter, or went away from the computer for a while, or to sleep, and so it wasn't until a day or so later that it occurred a second time. Hmmm... Then, I found that IE was going offline frequently, about every 20 minutes or so after I had put it back in Online mode. Now the problem
is a biggie. I had no idea why this started, and did not suspect CintaNotes.
I tend to do a
LOT of installing and uninstalling programs, installing updates, web browsing, downloading, and etc. -- way more than average, because I
(a) am an old computer "geek" (33 years),
(b) own a computer shop & services business (10 years), and
(c) am an incurably curious person, with a Ph.D.
So, even though I'm pretty knowledgable about this stuff, it's very difficult to correlate some new weirdness with any particular software program.
Especially so when the problem is intermittent and I don't know exactly when it started to occur. IE may have not been running at all when I installed CintaNotes
One possibility was some kind of virus infection, but my systems are very well protected, so although it's possible, malware is unlikely. Several manual and online scans failed to find any.
I spent a LOT of time searching for information about "Work Offline" problems, because I
need for IE to work. Though I do use Opera and Firefox, I sometimes need to use IE, and when I do, I often have 10-25 tabs open in it, so it's a real pain when IE goes offline.
I cannot simply stop using IE: there are many
other programs that use IE, they assume that IE is present and can access the internet -- So, even when I'm not using IE at the moment, these other programs are causing a warning to pop up periodically in front of whatever program I'm working in (Word, Excel, whatever) -- Warning that something cannot do what it needs to do, because IE is offline. This 'switching itself offline' thing is just
way too big of a problem to ignore -- something
has to be done.
But my research about the problem was getting nowhere.
I had almost given up on finding a specific cause and a fix, concluding that it must be caused by some corruption in IE or Windows, so I figured I will have to at least reinstall IE, and more likely will have do some major surgical repair work, or even worse, destructive things, to my Windows installation. Damn!
But, Today was my Lucky Day...
I mean, Man! this must
REALLY be my lucky day!!! -- It's a
miracle that I happened to find the cause of the aggravating 'IE Offline' problem,
just moments before I was going to begin doing some major, hugely time-consuming, and potentially hazardous operations on my computer.
Earlier today, by pure accident, I happened to cause CintaNotes to check for updates - and it found one. No biggie, I thought, probably not anything urgent. Normally, if I'm in the middle of doing other things (and usually I am), I just make a mental note to install that update (along with a batch of updates for other programs) later, at some convenient time.
But, unlike myself, for unknown reasons, by some strange quirk of fate, today I decided to go ahead and download and install it right away.
I also happened to go to the CintaNotes website (for some different reason), and once there I decided to take a quick peek at the forum: I scanned the first page of topics to see if there was anything that sounded interesting -- and I spotted one, an oddly-titled thread named:
"my frankenperfect notes_log_diary_container"
I thought to myself "now,
that sounds pretty weird", triggering my curiosity to open the message.
I quickly skimmed over it -- it seemed to be about his idea of 'the
perfect information management program', not of interest to me so I was about to close it -- but then I spotted the words "ie/offline" -- so I started reading that part of the message. It made no sense at all:
after my recent ie/offline issue with your small trusted app, i asked advice from my computer tech friend:
> how do greyhairs deal with this madness?
they bring it to me and I install Ubuntu 11 and turn off the updates.
I don't know what Ubuntu and greyhairs have to do with CintaNotes or with ie/offline, but it prompted me to search the forum for "offline" -- it found 22 occurrences, the first one being today's announcement of the new update. That message contained
the Eureka! moment that had eluded me for several days!! Oh, wow, Thank You, Lucky Stars!! I'm saved from having to do major, unpleasant things to my system!!
But... (
a Big But) ...
I could easily have missed seeing it, since the mention of the IE offline issue was buried way down in the middle of the third paragraph, treated as though it was just an unimportant afterthought, like, "and, um... Oh, yeah ... by the way, in addition to the
important stuff, this update also fixes this other, minor little thingie ..."
... and also gets rid of the nasty issue of putting IE offline (sorry for that once again). ...
????? -- Huh?
"and also" ???
Whoa... Excuse me, but a bug causing IE to go offline 72 times a day is NOT an
"and also", afterthought sort of bug. It is
a Majorly Bad Bug.
And, finally... TaDa! ... here it is:
The reason I am writing this enormous message is to say that:
(a) I am pretty darned unhappy with the developer at this moment, and
(b) I strongly feel that you:
1.
should have made the issue of "THE INTERNET EXPLORER 'WORK OFFLINE' BUG" prominently visible on the website and in the forum.
2.
should have IMMEDIATELY emailed ALL registered customers, as soon as you became aware that CintaNotes was causing IE to switch to Work Offline, to inform them of this
3.
should have removed the faulty version from the website
4.
should have advised customers to uninstall that faulty version and revert back to the previous release, until you could provide a fix for the bug.
5.
should have apologized to all customers for having released an update containing a major problem, vowing to do more thorough beta testing for future releases.
I say this, because your failure to do those things caused me (and many others) to:
a. suffer much aggravation from this bug for 10 days,
b. needlessly waste a LOT of time trying to figure out why the problem was occurring, and
c. very nearly begin, unnecessarily, to perform some major and potentially destructive operations on my system, in an attempt to fix the problem -- (because having failed to find the cause of the problem,
and because you failed to tell me about it when you could have done so, I was left to assume that the cause was some corruption in IE or in Windows itself.).
Please -- don't do this again!!P.S. Get well soon!