MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

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JohnvanSomeren
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MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by JohnvanSomeren »

MMEX often crashes shortly after I load it. Sometimes it is when I am selecting one of my two accounts, sometimes when I have selected an account and click to obtain a new transaction. It sometimes restarts automatically and I remember it used to offer me the opportunity to describe the bug before it sent off a report. 

It always recovers, and I never have any problems once the first transaction is posted.

I am using  Money Manager EX - Version: 1.2.7 under Windows 10 x64, but the same fault existed on my old laptop when it was W7 32-bit. 
paulcroft
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by paulcroft »

This happens to me if I try and enter a new transaction too quickly after starting a new session and there are recurring transactions which are due to update.  If there are no recurring transactions pending there's no problem.  To avoid the issue just requires a little patience and a check on the recurring transactions before starting off.  Hopefully this is something that will be fixed in a future release.  I'm not a programmer but I don't imagine this is too difficult to fix.1
Paul, MMEX user since April 2010
JohnvanSomeren
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by JohnvanSomeren »

Thanks for the update, Paulcroft. MMEX just crashed twice on me: I started it, selected one of my two bank accounts and clicked on New. Just as I keyed in the amount (the fefaults of all previous data items were fine) Windows reported that MMEX has stopped working. I started it again and it crashed in the identical place.

Then I came here (I had expected an e-mail when somebody replies, but not so. No doubt I can configure this).  There was your written experience and, lo and behold, when I went to look, I had had two automatic postings made to another of my accounts.

I can understand your hope that this is a simple bug, soon fixed, but I have had this (or a very similar ) problem for ages. If you told me it was a year I wouldn't be surprised. In previous versions it crashed, but didn't 'tell' Windows: it displayed a bug report and I would type in the circumstances and send it off. Sadly, the bug is still there, but I now have a way of avoiding its worst excesses.
paulcroft
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by paulcroft »

Hi Johnvan

I've just posted this as a bug on the MMEX bug reporting site so it should be picked up there soon.

Paul
Paul, MMEX user since April 2010
JohnvanSomeren
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by JohnvanSomeren »

Many thanks, Paul. I trued doing that twice on the Libre Office web site and I have never been so confused in my life. The trouble is, the people who replied were not all mere users. Some took a high-handed attitude and I gather that they are the ones who decide what sort of priority a report should have. MOST off-putting.

I do hope that this one is friendlier.

John
paulcroft
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by paulcroft »

Hi Johnvan

Sorry, meant to come back to you sooner.  If you have a bug to report the best way to do this is via:  Help > About and, on the About tab, is a link to, amongst other things, bug reports.  Takes you straight to the SourceForge page where reporting bugs is pretty straightforward.
Paul, MMEX user since April 2010
JohnvanSomeren
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by JohnvanSomeren »

paulcroft wrote:Hi Johnvan

Sorry, meant to come back to you sooner.  If you have a bug to report the best way to do this is via:  Help > About and, on the About tab, is a link to, amongst other things, bug reports.  Takes you straight to the SourceForge page where reporting bugs is pretty straightforward.
Thanks Paul. I can now see how to report a bug. 

If I ever write a book about bad interface design the MMEX Help menu will be the perfect illustration of how NOT to do it. The MMEX Help menu links you to 
  • Check updates
  • Get Android version
  • Visit the MMEX forum
  • View release info
  • Visit us on Facebook
  • About,,,
And then "About..." gives another list of links. It adds Bug Reports and Visit us on Twitter when similar items are on the main Help menu. To me, the About submenu should be just that: only the version number and other properties of the current release. Put all the links together and don't split them (and repeat some of them) in the About sub menu. 

Oh well (deep sigh) not everybody is perfect. After 50+ years of programming I am (a) perfect, (b) grumpy and (c) right even when I'm wrong. And I like it that way.
paulcroft
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by paulcroft »

I would not disagree with you but, then again, since this is the best money management software out there, I have learnt to accept its idiosyncrasies and work around them.  The perfect software is yet to be devised and those programmers who put this together and maintain/improve it doubtless figure there's more important stuff to spend their time on.
Paul, MMEX user since April 2010
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by Nikolay »

Hi Johnvan

Could you provide your vision of a help interface design for mmex?
It's, I beleave, more easy than write a book and may be used in future releases.
JohnvanSomeren
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Re: MMEX often crashes before I enter my first transaction

Post by JohnvanSomeren »

I am flattered. Here goes.

Your User manual is excellent. It has a clear and meaningful introduction and the 'meat' of the document looks complete and certainly is well written in the sections that I have used

However is it easy to find? The bue icon with a white question mark takes you straight into it, but MMEX has both a classical menu and a ribbon of icons. It is normal for the ribbon icons to be shortcuts for (often deeply-buried) menu options. In this case there is no menu choice leading to the User Manual and the icon's 'tooltip' merely says Show me the Help File. And help files are not the same as user manuals. 
Help files very often differ from user manuals by having a contents tree allowing you to find your help more quickly. Your User Manual's Contents Page is empty. Add a contents page with live links and you will have both a first rate user manual and a help file in the same document.

I would also expect you to clear the About menu of all items except those that refer to properties of the released program, like the release number, the development team names, the software you have licensed etc. I am sure I don't need to tell you, a program developer,  what a program's properties are, but it certainly does not include a list of additional help links. These are properties of the application and the application's web site, not the software that you have just promoted to production.

The Help menu's level 1 menu should contain all the links, including the ones presently on the About sub-menu. In my case, with a bug to report, I clicked on the Help menu item and saw lots of links, but none for a bug report. It never occurred to me that a similar list of useful links would be on the About page.

I hope that you find this helpful. I am totally in favour of a user community helping each other in a spirit of goodwill and your application is an excellent example.

Before I go...

and before you get too big headed about the praise I include above, I do have a gripe. I am 74 and this font is too small. Many web sites have  a set of three of four letter [A] of different sizes that I can use to shrink or grow the font. I really did think your web site had them, but I can't find them now.. I know I can use Ctrl + to grow the whole screen, but --- and believe me you will find this difficult to believe yourself --- MS Access uses the Ctrl + sequence to mean "Delete the current record". This is global and it cannot be switched off. I spend days designing a form for the user to use to query and and update the database and the poor fellow has just come from a web app. He hits Ctrl + to make the Access form bigger and loses the current record. Of course, I can add VBA to capture the Before Delete event, but should I have to? 

I started to program in Access five years ago and I still code most days. But I am conditioned as thoroughly as Pavlov's dogs: In my case I just cannot bring myself to hit Ctrl +!

With best wishes and my thanks for an excellent application

John van Someren
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