Any chance of the Parallels folk maintaining a public list of known limitations and bugs including: Whether they have been confirmed by the developers Whether the programmers needed any more error reports The priority assigned to them If fixed, which release they are fixed in? I appreciate that this would mean someone diverting time from the day job of developing Parallels (although there must surely be an internal version of this information) but the advantages would be: It would allow users to make an informed decision whether to download and install the current beta. The current "don't use this in production" is fair, but not very informative. It should help cut down on some of the signal-to-noise ratio on the beta@parallels.com mailbox. It would cut out some of the bitchy posts here. I'm sure we all appreciate that our favorite bug might not be fixed in the very next build, but it would be nice to know that its on the TODO list. A couple of beta "features" have caused quite a lot of ill-will, particularly the global sharing/drag and drop issue and the Boot Camp/Product activation issue (the first release was effectively useless if your windows version needed activation and almost certainly had people calling MS for a reactivation). Both of these would have been greatly alleviated if far more information had been available about the features and limitations of the beta. Its great to get early releases of cool/useful new features, but there is a flipside. Parallels are "advertising" the beta quite loudly (even if only on this site) and consequently most reviews and testimonials will be based on the beta, not the current box product - a considerable help in the forthcoming contest with VMware. Plus there is the "free" testing on evey permutation of hardware! A lot of users are spending valuble time upgrading/downgrading, reporting bugs and handing out self-help in this forum - and although Parallels is very reasonably priced it definitely isn't an open-source project.
All of this and more has been suggested before without response. It is close to impossible to get a dialog going with Parallels. Well, to be honest, I've never been successful. That doesn't mean they're not listening, but until the next release you'd never know. There's a practical side to this. If they revealed they had a bug in the snapshot module it would be equivalent to announcing they are offering a snapshot feature. Now that would be VMWare an early opportunity to lawyer up and to start flexing their patent numbers, and that might not be the most productive way to get the job done. Dramatics aside, (and there's no snapshot feature I'm aware of), they do have some things that need to remain secret. I still think there should be a formal beta process where specific tests are requested and data returned and where people have committed to being true beta testers and not just early implementers. Right about here drval struts in to tell us he's happy with what exists, and then spends weeks repeating himself without ever offering compelling supporting arguments. But we do know this is possible because we see it every day with other vendors both in and out of the GPL realm.
That's a nice straw man argument. A public "issues log" would only need to contain info about the current beta, or maybe non-sensitive issues like if/when brand x mobile phone is going to be supported. Obviously its not going to talk about headline features in the next major version. Anyway, no self-respecting patent troll is going to come out from under his bridge until the offending product is in the shops and making money so all those "irrepairable commerial damages" start to add up.
maybe a few of us should form an FAQ group.. create an account that several of us can use to post with and update an faq thread with common question solutions in (like the faq that got started and has never been kept up to date !!! ) or maybe Parallels could make a few of the regular supporters to moderators so we can do it without having to log in and out as different users to the forums !?
You seem have no idea how dibilitating a corporate legal group can be You and I would never see it as a valid reason but 'legal' sees the world differently than we do. There are issues of patentable idea and trademarkable idea that too much openness exposes and which are expensive to defend. I've long advocated better coordination between the dev group and the 'beta' testers, and how information is shared. It resulted in a very long, boring thread (http://forum.parallels.com/showthread.php?t=7403&highlight=bad+idea). Try not to draw drval's attention as it means certain thread death once he's on board.
