I’m a new registered owner of InspectVue. I see enough bugs to be concerned. Here’s an example: My narratives seem to “multiply” on their own. Sometimes when I modify a narrative, I later notice about 4 instances of the exact same narrative. They seem to have cloned each other. I select and delete 3 of the 4 and, voila, all 4 are gone before my very eyes. Tech support cannot explain why I have multiple instances of the same thing (they think it is “operator error”).
Some sloppy programming exits. For example: when doing an operation like copying files to your handheld, the progress bar goes to 100% and then just stops there. You get no confirmation the process completed successfully and the progress bar just stays at 100.
The program out of the box has duplication and redundancy. For example, you’ll see similar narratives in different categories. This leads to confusion and you wonder, “didn’t I just see that statement somewhere else?”.
I got some strange errors about narratives not existing (even though I was looking at them) and when you select them, the program crashes. When you try to delete them, the program crashes. The crashes do NOT give you a useful error code that you can report to tech. support. One of the fundamental techniques of programming is called “error trapping”. That is, you want to help the developer be able to identify what caused the crash. Useful code should be inserted to help determine where the error originated, but as far as I can tell, there is little to any error trapping in InspectVue.
Then, there is the issue of multiple narratives in different places. For example, you could have dozens of instances about outlet narratives (kitchens, living areas, bedrooms, bathrooms). If you change one, that doesn’t change them all. You then need to change all the other instances of the same narrative and it isn’t easy. You must delete the others and copy the one you just changed to all the other places and then re-sort the catagories, etc. Simply making one change to your outlet/receptacle narrative will require about an hour because you have to copy the changed file to all the other locations.
The program could benefit from being a true database instead of a text based application. That’s why changing one “record”, as stated above, doesn’t change them all.
Copying files to the memory card for use in a PDA can take hours! Unbelievable! Any other Windows application can copy/delete a similar amount of data to/from a memory card in minutes.
The method of program updating is rudimentary for today’s standards. It requires a lot of operator involvement instead of being more automated.
Then there are the annoyances. For example, the inspection report Table of Contents is at the VERY END of the report. That is NOT a table of contents. That’s called an index! You can’t change it however. Sentences break in the middle of pages. Lots of formatting stuff like that.
If you do buy it, you’ll spend **weeks **tweaking its text and layout and then you’ll experience issues like I described above, which you just have to live with because nobody can explain why you are having the problems.
InspectVue is due out with a major revision later this year I’m told by Porter Valley. You should wait on that revision in my view.
(My qualifications for this review include a BS in computer science and a former career as a software developer.)
