v9.0.0.41 - some kind of a joke?

[dancedar]

I've followed v8 development for several years and have never felt an issue arose of such severity it required me to register & post on it but...
V9...what the actual f...?!

This has to be some kind of joke, right?
The interface is dreadful, truly awful. IT's flat in colour, ux has gone down the sink, it's laggy as hell on all 3 of my machines (two highky specced enough that they can run Lightroom reasonably well!), its huge and looks like it was designed in kindergarden, you can't resize it smaller so on my laptop it almost fills the screen at its minimum height. It runs like cr@p on my machines, and has lost the feel of a small but powerful tool to one which Norton has taken over. Delta copying has been requested for over a decade and I'd love to use it, but I simply cannot use V9, it's terrible. You're going to be losing a ton of pro & se users to other software now-or sticking to V8 like me.

Guys. Please. What the hell happened? I saw the screenshots and thought it was some kind of joke; you need to look at Bvckup for a slick ui, not Windows 3.1.

Sincerely, a totally disppointed V8 user

[mickyj]

Hi, a constant issue we had with the user interface was that it was too small. The fonts were too small. The graphics were too small. It was squashed into a small size. This is because the interface pre-V9 was designed with XP. The UI also didn't scale with DPI changes. The current version resolves all those issues. Obviously the UI is not going to suit everyone, and we expected that, just as the old interface certainly didn't suit everyone. The minimum screen size is 1024x768, which is the minimum Windows recommended resolution. If you have a resolution that low then it obviously is going to look large.

For the performance, yes, it is a bit slower for the windows to initially appear because of the dynamic scaling of the images. We'll work on improving this. However, once a window appears it shouldn't be laggy at all. If it is, then that is an issue we want to fix. We've not seen it laggy, even via a remote desktop connection, so if we can reproduce this it would certainly help. Can you provide any details on the specs of the machines? e.g. RAM, CPU, graphics card? Thanks

[highend]

Now you need a decent graphic card to render a GUI of a backup program? oO

yes, it is a bit slower for the windows to initially appear

Are you kidding me?

It takes 3 seconds from double clicking the last v8 version to be visible and usable
and ~14 seconds for v9. The tray icon appears after 9 seconds, the GUI itself
takes 5 seconds more to be visible and usable. And you call that "a bit slower"?

Core I5 (quad core) @ 4GHz, 16GB Ram
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660
The app is started from a 500 GB Samsung NVME SSD (3 GB/s max read speed)...

[mickyj]

Hi, I see you're angry about this, and I know you care otherwise you wouldn't be taking the time to tell us. I genuinely appreciate that and I'm not just saying that to butter you up. I'm not exactly over the moon about this. I've spent the last 2 years of my life working constantly on this release. It's not a great feeling when people say they're not happy with it. Why would we want to people to buy a pile of crap? You know we aren't just going to brush it off and ignore it.

We're already working very hard at reducing these load times and have done. We'll be releasing a beta soon that I would very much like you to test to see if it fixes these load times or at least greatly reduces them.

Can you confirm when you said lag before, you are referring to the load times? I just want to clarify as that would be a different issue we'd need to resolve.

Thanks

[highend]

The whole program is "a lag". Double clicking a profile to open it = 5-6 seconds.

Nothing, absolutely nothing is instant. Even right clicking the tray icon. Half a second
later it opens. Try to open the tray icon context menu with v8. Do you see any lag? I don't.

Everybody knows that Electron is NOT the way to create snappy applications.
Yeah, it helps if you want to make something cross-plattform and that's all.

Why didn't you use e.g. Sciter instead? It wouldn't have ended in such a catastrophe...

[mickyj]

Hi, it's not Electron (which we don't use) or anything like that. It's not a component/library issue really, more of a DPI image scaling performance issue. It's a trade off between either slower loading or slower interface. Slower interface we can't fix, but slower loading we can.

Opening a profile for modification is something we're working on right now.

I don't understand the pop-up menus being slow to open, as they're standard Windows pop-ups (same as in V8) where the images are already there and ready to go (unlike new windows). I don't see any delay at all for those.

Hopefully we'll get a beta out in the next few days.

Thanks

[highend]

What exactly have you done if you weren't repackaging the whole thing into Electron?

File size (x64) 8.6.7.6: 57 MB
File size (x64) 8.6.7.6: 153 MB

[Jon_C]

mickyj said either ... "Hi, a constant issue we had with the user interface was that it was too small."

Ok, on a 4k screen we get:

[Jon_C]

mickyj said either ... "Hi, a constant issue we had with the user interface was that it was too small."

Ok, on a 4k screen we get:

So much for the embedded image from OneDrive - basically it showed the confirmation of lost of changes box (Global Settings) being so small in relation to the rest of the UI I can't actually read it.

[bamateau]

Sorry, but I have to 2nd the remarks about the UI. Awful. Way too much white space between the lines. Text bigger than it needs to be. I have to scroll and scroll to see all my profiles. We need to be able to scale this ourselves in this situation. I dislike it so much I may go back to ver 8. (My screen is 1920x1080, scaled at 100%)

[dancedar]

How this passed testing I have no idea, it's an absolutely shocking release; I've just tried on a rather high-specced win 10 x64 build and it's usable in that it's not Lightroom/Adobe slug, but it's a far far cry from what it was and should be. Guys, seriously, before 'proper' reviews get out and you're crushed please pull v9 and have a rething or complred rebuild, or continue to base it off of v8. V9, as it stands, is going to leave you dead in the water.

[highend]

File size (x64) 8.6.7.6: 57 MB
File size (x64) 8.6.7.6: 153 MB

Ofc the version information on the button needs to be:
9.0.0.41

And please don't tell me that you blew it up by adding 90+ MB of black and white icons...

[bamateau]

I just ran a group backup profile for the first time. Yikes. Now I dislike the UI even more than I did when I made my initial post. That huge progress box is awful. The "standard" concise green progress bar of ver 8 is much more pleasing and conveys the necessary info in way much less space. I hate to bash all your hard work, but the ver 9 UI is very unpleasant.

[bhenshaw]

Yes, this is really sad isn't it. The developers obviously spent so much time and effort to come up with the new UI and it is absolutely horrible. I've been using SyncBack for about 10 years. I guess I'll stick with version 8 until it stops working and then look for another product. Too bad... SyncBackSE has been a great product for years. I have never been able to figure out why companies change what is already the best product on the market. Think Coke vs. New Coke.

[mickyj]

Hi, we've released V9.0.1.1 which greatly improves the loading time of the windows. For the size, we hear you and are working on reducing it. Thanks