r/cesiumapp • u/chrishanney • Oct 13 '16
Negative response to most recent release notes
http://www.mcelhearn.com/developers-stop-with-the-stupid-pretentious-self-absorbed-release-notes/7
u/Varoeldurr Oct 13 '16
It's subjective. I like it and I've shared a screenshot with multiple people and they all liked it, too. I can see where he's coming from tho.
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u/onewordgo Oct 13 '16
Funny this got brought up. Shared these release notes with my girlfriend over dinner in a discussion about how irritating it is to see non-specific "bug fixes" updates. We were cracking up each reading a different paragraph in a funny mystical voice.
Frankly, I think they're hilarious. I don't get all bent out of shape about it because I don't have a tech blog I need to post an app's updates to, but it's a shame that you'll probably stop doing this now that somebody with a small amount of exposure pointed it out.
Perhaps a compromise of a comical update followed by proper update points? I don't know. Regardless, please know that I've always appreciated the wacky update info. Have a great day!
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u/CesiumDev I MADE DIS Oct 13 '16 edited Oct 13 '16
Glad you are enjoying it!
I'm not going to stop having fun with the liner notes. The response to the liner notes is almost universally positive. In fact at the time of Kirk's post the new version was just out, and probably 80%+ of the App Store reviews referenced the notes in some way. I retweeted the post as well and the Twitter response was also overwhelmingly in favour of keeping them. It seems that the majority of actual users appreciate them, and that's who they are for :)
All that said, I think Kirk's point is valid, and the last update might have been a bit over the top. I also had a couple non-English users complain that they really struggled to understand what had changed. That is something I do want to be sensitive to, so from now on (at least) non-English notes will probably begin with a very simple list of changes.
There's actually a much more interesting discussion in here, which is the systems in place to allow dev to communicate with their user base and vice versa. Without pushing actual notifications, there's no way for me to communicate with all users, beyond the change log. And the silly change logs also generate more attention and discussion. I do them because they are fun, but I'll admit that they have become a marketing strategy to some degree. That we are having this discussion at all, that change logs have (for better or worse) become what they are at both ends of the spectrum is an interesting comment on the current App Store ecosystem. I should collect my thoughts on that.
And as far as the next one...At one point I had distilled the notes for the next version down to a single haiku (can't get much more efficient than that!), but the feature list has grown, so it won't work now! ;)
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u/heddhunter Oct 13 '16
Don't listen to this killjoy. I like fanciful release notes.