UR Just Disappeard and so am I.

[cnewtonne]

I was working with UR today and had about 10 tabs open. There was a duplicate tab open and when I attempted to close it, UR in its entirety JUST disappeared.

It was gone, no error, no warning, nothing. I have no idea why and what and where it went!!!!!!!!!!!

I purchased UR about a year ago now. Back then, I loved its features but it was not stable enough for hard-core editing work. I had AV errors, crashes, and so forth.

When I checked it out with its new release (3), I said to myself I will give it another try. I was all over it. Exploited it to its fullest features and put it to the real test. For the past few weeks, I did most of my work in UR. I can not tell you how much I loved its features. I just could not resist.

Then I started migrating my years worth-of-work to it. A process that took a whole week. All along, I was getting these nasty AV errors but ignored them and I said 'I got to live wit it' and so I did.

I then saw other users post issues about missing data, crashes, errors and, again, said to myself, 'not me. This will not happen to me.' so I convinced myself.

Today, with this culmination of errors when UR decided to un-respectfully and rudely terminate itself, I felt pretty much insulted.

It took me a while to decide if I should move to UR or not. A process that consumed a good deal of mental and physical work on my part.

Now, however, I think I had enough. The issue is no longer that difficult and I'm letting go of UR. Not a year ago and still not now.

I'm not saying this product is not good in general. It is not for my kind of use as a power user. May be for someone who treats it gently for few notes here and there.

I have written at least 3 reviews recommending it for other users. I have always ranked 2nd to MyBase. I think I can still do the same and I do not regret making such recommendations. I still believe in it, its potential, and the ability of its developers. However, there is not consolation on earth that will make me feel good if I loose a single piece of data because of it.

Kinook must come up with a way to make this app stable. Using sqlite DB engine is pretty assuring. The GUI, the tabs, the tree, ...etc are all elements that have added some heavy weight on top of its DB engine. Furthermore, it has made it unstable. To keep all these elements in sync as you perform major operation like moving, updating editors, notes, properties is no easy task by all means.

You support is excellent and you are on top of these issues. However, to keep telling your users to upload their files is not practical. Most of the time, it is private data. If your users keep telling you the same, why not devise a different way to debug and receive application errors. Otherwise, you will be asking users to send it, and they will refuse and the thing goes on forever.

You can see that my posts have proliferated in the past 2 weeks after an almost a year long absence. I even made my purchase just yesterday and I truly do not feel sorry about it. After all, you deserve every penny you earn at least for the time you spend addressing the forum posts.

I want to thank you for all your replies. I'm so sorry that I have reached this conclusion since I was truly hoping otherwise. I will put UR to sleep for now as it rudely wanted to. I will be watching out for your future releases as I will always be a big fan of your work.

Thank you.

[kinook]

We'd certainly like to fix any bug resulting in access violations and UR exiting unexpectedly. The problems you've been reporting do seem to be related to having many tabs open. We don't normally keep more than two or three tabs open at once, but we've been running with 12 tabs for the last few days and haven't encountered these problems, but we'll keep trying.

As far as data loss, you should never lose anything but unsaved changes to the current tab (and using a shorter auto-save delay at 'Tools | Options | Editor | Auto-save changes every x minutes' can reduce the unsaved changes). Most users do find UR to be very stable (typically, we only hear from those having trouble). I do apologize for the problem you're encountering and hope that we can eventually isolate and resolve it.

As far as data privacy, any files you send are kept strictly confidential and the contents are not examined beyond what is needed to reproduce problems. We can also look into providing a debugging build to run on your system; please contact us at support@kinook.com if you'd like to pursue that.

[DonMcKenzie]

Just my 2 cents as a power UR user.

I use UR continuously for 9-10 hours a day.
Every bit of information about everything I work on goes into UR.

The .urd file is almost 50MB.
It has the full history of every task of the over 500 projects I've worked on since 2005.
It has all my procedures, systems information, and more.
I use user-defined templates, multiple tabs, the browser shell, etc.

I've run it on Vista, XP, 2000.

I can count on one hand the number of times that it's crashed in 2 years of use and I've never lost any data.

[Jon Polish]

I agree with Cnewtonne but have different reasons. I appreciate that it took a week to migrate your data into UR. I have to regularly import and export large amounts of data to UR and find the process to be maddeningly slow. I have no doubt that your week long migration could have been reduced to a day or two. My experiences with other information repositories (although not all) is that there are others that do this job far more efficiently.

There is a problem with importing large, note delimited files. I have learned to plan these imports around times when the computer is free. The normal dialogue appeared when the process was initiated. Imagine my surprise to return the next morning to find the import failed - no error message, nothing.

I am frustrated with UR hogging 100% of the CPU, virtually disabling my ability to do anything else with the machine. I rarely see this with my other information managers and I would expect the highly intelligent, professional, and responsive designers of UR to recognize this shortcoming and fix it.

UR's reliance on Microsoft products for me is regrettable, but understandable. However, IE has significant shrtcomings which are not completely resolved by using an external browser. I am referring to the occasional appearance of the "switch to" dialogue.

I have stated before that emailing data to help with problem resolution is not an option for me. I respect Kinook's integrity - but the law says that I could go to jail for disclosure of patient information. It also is unethical, so I can't.

Please excuse me if I seem to be piling it on. This program is fantastic and has great potential. I think we need to admit that it has problems that require resolution before adding features.

Cnewtonne, can you tell me to which software you will be returning?

Jon

[dasymington]

I also use UR for about 10 hours a day. I often have 6 or more tabs open. Occasionally it has crashed but I haven't lost any more than the data in the current tab.

My database is 850 MB and it seems fairly stable to me.

[Jon Polish]

Yes, but don't you find that import / export of large amounts of data take inordinately long and take over all system resources? My other comments I made above are all reproducible and diminish productivity. I hope these will be addressed before proceeding to add additional features.

Maybe this is a consequence of the way I use UR, but the program is designed for such flexibility that I cannot believe I am the only one with these criticisms.

Jon

[dasymington]

Jon, I don't generally import large amounts of data, but I do find it takes UR a good few seconds to import a small email message file (.eml) so I can sympathise with you if you're importing many files often. Fro me, the disadvantage of slow import times is outweighed by UR's other features.

[zargron]

Question for DonMcKenzie:

You commented that with UR, you have "...the full history of every task of the over 500 projects I've worked on since 2005. It has all my procedures, systems information, and more. I use user-defined templates, multiple tabs, the browser shell, etc..."

Just wondering whether you would mind taking a moment to share some "tips & tricks" for the benefit of all on how you use UR in such a way?

[DonMcKenzie]

A whole bunch of typing. :-)
My attitude is to put in as much info as possible so that I know I have one place to go look for it.

Identification.
I assign a 'project number'. Generally this is the date (0605a) or similar. If there's an associated Help Desk ticket then I use that number.
I plug this number into the category field in Outlook for related emails.

Projects (in UR)
Each of 'project number' is at the top of a project. All tasks and info are in an outline below this title.

Top Level items in UR:

WIP
Has these immediate children.
Now. Items I'm currently working on or need to today.
Pending. Stuff waiting on others or schedule.
Done. Things for the status report and archive.

Archives
Just what it says. I generally store it by quarter so that I can archive the emails into smaller PSTs.

Contacts.
I copy the primary contact into each project (above) so that I can see quickly what I'm working on or have worked on for a person in the Parents frame.

Reference.
General reference stuff. Useful info, etc.

Dev.
Reference specific to languages.
Tips, techniques, examples.
C#, JavaScript, VB, Oracle, etc. are major immediate children.


Templates.
For 2 primary purposes.
Project types.
These include all the typical tasks for a type of project.
I insert a new instance into Now as needed.
Structures.
For example, a Database has a columns sub-folder, etc.


Searches (of course).
A new one that I really like is the Search Siblings only. I have one of these in most templates.
Saved searches for upcoming go-lives, etc.


Embedded browser.
Most of my work is with web pages in different environments (TST, QA, PRD). I put the links to the pages directly into UR so that I can get the page quickly (CTL-link).
I don't generally store the actual page in UR.


So there. A not-too-brief overview.

[zargron]

Sh*t hot Don.
Thanks for taking time out to respond.

[DonMcKenzie]

Something I didn't mention is the Next Action search.

I flag tasks that are Next Action for the project with an Orange flag.

Then I use a Search Siblings search in the project (in the template).

For this Search, I specify to look for all items with an Orange flag.
It's basically a flat list of the tasks that I can work on now.
Generally there are only 1 or a few items here at any given time.

The neat thing about this is that the task is removed from Next Action search automatically when I flag it complete (it's no longer Orange).

I used to have a container for Next Action. Had to drag things in and out of it.
But I had to maintain it myself. Now the removal part is automatic.