Bug report: wet pants

Coming in the next post: details on the OmniFocus Macworld Get-Together Thingie, Which May or May Not Involve Party Hats. Stayed tuned!

In the meantime, I wanted to share this actual email exchange with Omni's technical support department:

<strong>Subject: [Bug Report] Water Outside Building</strong></p> <p>Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2006 23:41:50 -0800</p> <p>To: support@omnigroup.com</p> <p>From: "David"</p> <p>Ticket: 130265</p> <p>Product/Component: Omni Development, Inc.</p> <p>Classification: UI/Usability</p> <p>Reproducible? Y

Error: A large (4-5 inches deep?) puddle was present outside Omni Group's office earlier tonight.

Steps to Reproduce:</p> <p>1. Wait for large amount of rain and power outage.</p> <p>3. Exit Zoka onto NE Blakeley Street, heading in the direction of 25th Ave NE.</p> <p>4. Note lack of lighting outside building, due to power outage.</p> <p>5. Accidently step into deep pool of water next to Omni Group parking lot.</p> <p>6. Notice wet pants and shoes.</p> <p>7. Take sad bus ride home with wet pants.

Expected Results: Stepping onto concrete.</p> <p>Actual Results: Stepping into deep puddle.

Workaround: Leave Zoka from the opposite door, heading towards 30th Ave NE. This workaround is not optimal, as it requires that the user navigate around University Village Mall in order to reach University of Washington's campus.

Patch:</p> <p>*** blakeley.street Thu Dec 21 19:48:09 2006</p> <p>--- blakeley.street Thu Dec 21 23:31:26 2006</p> <p>***************</p> <p>*** 1,4 ****</p> <p>Zoka</p> <p>OmniGroup</p> <p>- Puddle</p> <p>Street</p> <p>--- 1,3 ----</p> <p>

….and the response from one of our Support Ninjas, Joel:

David-

This is less of an Omni bug and has more to do with the COSFrameworks, as all we really do is take advantage of the easements provided (as do other companies such as Zoka) and when there is a decided *lack* of a leak such as the case here, well, the water tends to pool up and sadly there's not much we can do about it until COS fixes it.

I have heard tell that in future releases garbage collection may be able to take care of such problems, that remains to be seen as I doubt leaves shall be considered in this schema and I'm not sure if independent GC (as is done now) will be able to or be willing to accept the challenge.

A more simple workaround would be to cross Blakeley somewhere between steps 3 and 5. I see you have no step 2, which is puzzling and preventing me from reproducing this bug here. A much more complex solution would be for Omni and/or Zoka to move to another location (such as ~/Blakeley/ instead of /Blakeley/).

Thanks for the feedback, and hope that helps.

Joel Page

Support Engineer

The Omni Group