Analyzer 3.0: does anyone use it?

[lucidlee]

I'm wondering if there are many users of Waves in Motion's Analyzer 3.0. I bought it in about October last year along with FMDev 6.0 and have been unable to use it reliably because of a few ackowledged bugs. Since they still have not issued a working version I'm sort of thinking there can't be much demand for it. If that's the case what do other developers use to debug and document their applications?

TIA

Lee

[Lee Smith]

Hi Lee,

I have a copy of Analyzer "lite" and it works fine for me. AFAIK the only difference between the two versions is that "lite" doesn't do scripts.

It does a very good job of showing file make up, and since it is free, I can get along with out the Script part. However, since Developer comes with the DDR feature now, I sure wouldn't purchase the full version as it seems to duplicate a lot of the things that Analyzer does.

I'm sure you must have contacted Wave In Motion about this, what did they say?

I belong to five FileMaker Lists and I have never heard anyone say a bad word about their customer service.

HTH

Lee

[Oldfogey]

Are we talking about the same product? I use Analyzer 3.0 and it has saved me many hours. IMHO it is

almost indispensable for a developer. The only complaint I have is the paucity of printed reports but I can live

with that.

As for using FMP's DDR, why re-invent the wheel? I'm sure that Analyzer took more than someone's wet

weekend to develop.

[Lee Smith]

Well, you managed to miss the point of both posts?

lucidlee stated

>> unable to use it reliably because of a few acknowledged bugs"

>>

> to which he was wondering (I guess) if others were having problems and that

To which I suggested he contact Waves in Motion because I thought that was were he he should be posting this, instead of this list. Why because I have never heard anyone complain about their customer service, in fact, it has been the contrary, many compliments about there support. This covers several years and several lists that I participate in devoted to FileMaker.

>> Since they still have not issued a working version I'm sort of thinking there

>> can't be much demand for it."

> And I guess he was assuming that they were not going to correct the bugs.

My response was that I have used a "lite" version of Analyzer (for several years) and it has been really helpful, AND that the only difference between Analyzer 3 and the "lite" version that I know of is the ability to have the script analyzed also. I have several other tools to do this so that is no big deal.

I don't own the Developer edition so I don't have the ability to test and compare DDR to Analyzer. However, I have seen a couple of DDR reports, and from what I can tell, DDR appears to duplicate what Analyzer does.

However, since you did reply:

> As for using FMP's DDR, why re-invent the wheel? I'm sure that Analyzer took

> more than someone's wet weekend to develop.

Which then brings up the real question that was posted.

How do the two differ that makes the investment in Analyzer 3.0 justifiable.

Lee

[SteveB]

I use Analyzer 3.0 and like it. My big complaint is that it is very slow and takes over 2 hours to analyze an 11 file solution. I haven't found it to be unstable.

Analyzer Lite is not being offered anymore and hasn't been for over a year. They stopped because it was free I guess. Lee, hang on to your copy (if you can live without analyzing scripts)!

The DDR, ah what a piece of misbegotten dodo. Basically another FMI abortion. Too little, not worth the bytes it takes up on your disk. No documentation, no useful reports. Serves merely as an input for other apps.

You might want to consider Chapparal's Brushfire. Much faster, but I think its more unreliable than you find Analyzer to be. Can't run under Win 98. Needs an NT platform (2000, XP, NT). I think you may need Developer for this one.

There's also a freebee from Bob Weaver that's posted in the samples section of this forum.

Steve

[lucidlee]

Sorry to get back to this thread so slowly...

The problems I have been having with Analyzer are strictly related to the fact that I attempted to use it with FM Developer 6.0.

Up to that point I was a sort of happy newbie FMP5.5 developer but as I was having a tought time unravelling some misbehaving scripts the WIM website convinced me that I needed a Developer version to use Analyzer. This was around the time that Dev 6 was soon to be released. I ummed and arred and finally waited for Dev 6 before buying both it and Analyser. At this point the website carried no direction about what version of Developer was required. I pretty quickly discovered that Analyzer could not reliably import the DDR that Dev 6 produced due to a couple of new features whose identity for the moment escapes me.

In any case I wrote to WIM and Geoff Coffey replied that in fact there were problems with it just as I had encountered and that a fix would be forthcoming. The website was subsequently edited to say that only Dev 5.5 or earlier was compatible. Now that was about end October 2002. I have subsequently written twice to WIM and each time Vincent Mennano has replied offering a new deadline, each of which has passed with no fix released. I'm currently reviewing a beta of the 3.5 version but again there's no release date for that either. Since one of WIMs excuse for not releasing was to say that they have been busy with other projects I just assumed that Analyser was not top of their priorities due to relatively low sales.

Having said that WIM were very responsive to all of my correspondence during, and after, presale wherein I was interested in discovering how useful Analyzer was in development. My main interest was in whether it could be useful when development is proceeding rapidly and thus assist in the debugging process. I must say at this point that I 'm a relatively new Filemaker user, having largely used Helix for the last 18 years, but I still embark on dauntingly complex tasks as a sort of fire on the feet learning process, assuming my core db concepts learned with Helix are useful in FileMaker but for the syntax. As such I find debugging Filemaker scripts very time consuming and frustrating given that many are 'composites' residing in separate files but often required to be integrated to achieve a particular goal. I also have difficulty determining which fields and calculations are being used and where, if at all. In Helix a Get Info menu item allows me to drill down through any object /icon to get to a particular underlying icon and edit it - all in realtime and the system automatically marks unused icons. I sort of hoped Analyzer would provide that functionality but it doesn't and has speed penalties which would seem to negate its value other than documenting a completed Application.

Thus my original question: how does the rest of the FM developer base deal with their debugging needs and does Analyzer help?

In the Helix world there is an equivalent product called 'Evalix' which processes a Helix DDR that, rather than try to do what Get Info already does well, concentrates on evaluating the competence of the development decisions, assessing the complexity of the code and offering up suggestions for improvements. It would seem to me that Analyzer should do that if it can't provide reatime drill down editing of FM objects.

I should add I use Visualizer as well which, although buggy and a little limited in output control, is great and has no Helix counterpart.

Lee

I've attached a tiny demo Evalix report but you should check out Evalix yourself: http://datapixel.net/software/evalix.html