Brent Bye's dashboard

Wow, I was just posting to drop a hint that I was starting to feel sluggish in the M7 tools, and here you guys are absolutely on top of it!

Super glad to hear that you have a plan well under way for dealing with the issues your customers encounter.
I can only imagine that your team has been noticing issues building way before I even began to notice them myself.

Kudos to the Market 7 development team for being so prompt and responsive to the customers needs.

Thanks as always Seth...

The fix to the type ahead function is very graceful now...and speedy, thanks guys!

For me, this issue isn't a big problem, just more of a nuisance.
I'm not in writing mode. Currently, when the script is in draft mode, I'm just making minor changes here and there.

I must say that from the beginning, your team has kept such high priority against never loosing data that I haven't lost any major changes at all because of the M7 server-side 'auto-save' feature.

Stressing the auto-save factor from the beginning of the Market 7 development has really provided peace of mind, even when these minor bugs pop-up.
All thanks to your team for designing a robust data storage method. Without it these bugs would feel more damaging, but so far, I don't feel the bug has caused me to feel as if any data was ever at risk.

Let me know if I can provide any other troubleshooting from my side.

Tests were completed on a separate machine with interesting results.

First attempt was to open up Safari and Firefox first and load the scripts in each. Then an attempt was made to open up FCP on that machine...no go. Final Cut Pro just hung on the load screen and locked up the entire machine.

Restarted machine and opened Final Cut Pro first on second attempt. Opened fine.
Then opened Safari and loaded a script in 'Draft' mode.
Opened Firefox next and loaded same script in 'Recent Published'.
Hid all applications and worked in other programs.
Within a half hour, Safari in Draft mode quit and Firefox in Publish mode remained open.

Switched the scenario with the exact opposite findings. Firefox quit while in Draft mode and Safari remained open displaying the Published version.

These tests verify the same behavior as the previous versions listed for Safari and Firefox in the first few threads.

These tests were with:
Safari 3.2.3
Firefox 3.0.1
Final Cut Pro 6.0.5
Quicktime 7.6.2

I don't use any plug-ins for FCP at all that I'm aware of. I'll look and see if there's something I installed a long time ago, but this particular machine is a production box that we keep pretty stock as a dependable workhorse.

We are in the middle of production and I don't normally update FCP to the latest version when mid-project. Can't risk having FCP quit issues while under the gun to complete a client project.

Perhaps one of my other machines can be used to experiment further...
I'll try to set up the same environment on another 8-core Mac Pro we have.
It has older versions of the browsers however and I don't think that Firefox 3.x and Safari 3.x where having issues as described.

I'll post back...

Don't want to send you guys on a wild goose chase if the problem is indeed on my end and associated with my machine only. Trying to verify the same issue on another machine but have different versions of the two browsers.

Here is the latest error message from Safari after an unexpected quit ( I wasn't even at the machine when it quit). Came back from lunch to this message:

Not sure if this screen shot will be helpful to troubleshooting but here is an error message that Firefox give upon restart stating it's inability to automatically reinstate the session and windows...

Finally, Flash Catalyst has been released as a beta program.

Many of the functions that were demoed over 18 months ago have been removed from the beta version, but the basics of image manipulation and creation of "page states" is included.

The integration with Photoshop and Illustrator is awesome and the addition of interactivity for simple applications is super easy.

Can't wait to see video added back in...

Here is a quick Photoshop mock-up of the idea with an area added at the top of the script to allow for upload of the final edit of a completed script/project.

The above mentioned problem of the script numbering is not dealt with in the screen shot but it's easy to imaging that the "archive" clip above the script would be separate of scene numbering and would not affect the scripts scene numbers in any way.

Perhaps there is much more useful data that could be added to next to the clip but I just added a tag for who uploaded, director and producer of the project and final run time of the edit...

Have a look at their product line as of late 2008:

• iMacs are bigger and thinner than ever. No more 17", only 20 and 24" models.
• Notebook computers have all switched to the LED screens.
• Apple TV capable of downloading and playing full HD movies and shows
• iTunes store fully capable of download and tracking of rentals, purchases and free content from audio to vid podcasts to TV and films.

The infrastructure is there, the technology is developed, yet disconnected across many products in the Apple line-up.

It's only a matter of time until Apple offers a 36" to 42" version of an iMac, AppleTV display to hang on the wall.
A perfect entrance to the consumer's all-in-one 'main digital display' with the twist of full interactivity, movies on demand and central control of your entire in-house entertainment system.

You know that that display exists in the Apple labs already...it has to.
Their lunch breaks must be filled with kicking back and jamming tunes, watching YouTube clips, and watching movies from their own iTunes store...

I want one...who wouldn't.
I used to carry a Macbook, camera, iPod, USB drive and a phone when I traveled.
Now I cruise around with only my iPhone. All the same functions, in my pocket...

Convergence is king!

I haven't spent too much time in my scripts since the launch of the "production version" of M7 but now that I'm back to regular usage, the javascript error is becoming noticeably painful...

Here is the error on my iMac G5 running OS 10.5.5 and Firefox 3.03



Sometimes it seems to slow my writing experience, other times I'm not so sure if the script is badly affecting my experience, but the error warning persists at all times when loading a new script.

I'm a bit confused after running a few experiments...

One machine I write on is an older iMac G5 running OS X 10.5.4 and Firefox 3.0.1. I also installed Firefox 2.0.0.16 on this machine recently and am getting varied results of the javascript waring/error.
Earlier today there was an error in Firefox 3 only and not when using Firefox 2 (which was counter to your advice to downgrade to Firefox 2) Now the error appears in both browser versions (see attached images)





Once the error appears, the scripting experience slows to a crawl and I pretty much have to give up after 10 minutes of trying to write on the iMac.

We have some other MacPro towers here as well. Intel chips, OS X 10.5 also but each of them have only Firefox 3.0.1 installed. I was getting errors on them last week, but after trying them today, they gave not javascript errors and seemed to not cause the browser to hang...today that is. They were hanging badly last week during the errors.

I'm not sure what to make out of these experiments. I'd love to be able to work on my iMac as there are designers on the MacPro's but...who knows, I wonder if the old G5 processor has anything to do with this...?

I'd like to put in a vote for an ASAP fix on this one if possible...(maybe this weeks server update?)

It's just too tedious to have to click in a Script Writing cell...wait for 30 secs...then click "stop script" in the error dialog...then wait...all that happens twice...then work for 5 minutes to have everything hang for two minutes...and so on.

I hope the hanging behavior is only related to this javascript issue.
As of now, It's pretty painful to work on a script.

Please help !

Thanks for the explanation Shannon.

I had never even thought about it until I got on a call with a paying client. Then all of a sudden, in his mind he's asking me "well since we're looking at the same script...can I just start making changes here?". I didn't really know how to respond and told him to just let me make changes on my side that we both agreed to on the phone.

The way you guys have designed the "cells" to be individual sounds very intelligent and intuitive. That was my next thought on the phone with the client. I told him we might be able to work out a way for each of us to pick areas of the script to work on separately, yet on the same version. That scenario would work well for us. As a future feature request, it may be good to be able to track who is working on what part of a script and lock others out of editing ability with permissions of some sort to keep all this collaboration bullet proof...future requests of course.

The only strange thing we experienced based on your explanation above is that my client didn't see any of the updates I made, even after reloading the page in his browser.
He was using Firefox on a PC (don't know what version). I was on Firefox 3.0 on a Mac. I made some changes we discussed on the phone and he wanted to see the changes. I asked him to reload the page, navigate to another area of M7 (file secction) and then back to the Script. He never saw the changes occur on his side. I wonder if it was something as simple as a browser cache on his side...that would be a bit of a bummer though, to ask a non-technical client to dig into dreaded preferences and dump the browser cache in a conference call situation to see updates. I don't think a corporate vice president would think fondly of their production partners in that scenario.

If some AJAXish type method of instant updates to the script "cells" could be implemented, it would be pretty freakin awesome to not have to deal with browser settings and have stuff update upon a page refresh while on the phone with a client.

Thanks guys...just a couple suggestions to throw in the pot.