Sad to say, it won't be the profitable Christmas I was hoping for. I've had to halt production of all 40 of my client Apps, I don't want to release my client's iOS 7 Apps with the current BTv3 version, until the bugs are worked out, if I'm building Apps for myself, it's OK to play with, but the last thing any paid developer would want is to jeopardize a client relationship, by not delivering perfection. worst case scenario I would need to find an alternative work around or build directly in xcode. I wanted to address this yesterday at the dev webinar, but I've been in Critical Care ICU since Sat and moved to a private room in the hospital 30 minutes late to the scheduled webinar, the wifi was so jacked, I could only hear bits of the webinar and type chatting didn't work. Probably a firewall issue and limited patient room bandwidth. At least I have a valid excuse that I'm in the hospital for the time being, and told my clients I'd have to postpone their official App launch date to 2014. Not having a shiny App to promote to friends during the Holidays and New Years, hurts future potential client referrals. If what Susan teased us about something coming soon that BT has in the development pipeline would make it easier to use BT. Then should we hold out again till 2014? Frustrating to say the least..must be all these IV bags i'm hooked up to. Will have to divert my BT efforts elsewhere on non-app development, and do something related for now, read the forums for more bugs. Is anyone tracking, archiving all the posts for Bugs-> Fixes-> ReTest-> Stable Release type thing. And what plugin it relates to, and same with core fixes for Self Hosters. There should be Forum Categories for "BTv2.19 - Bugs, Errors, Fixes, Stable Release" and "BTv3.0 - Bugs, Errors, Fixes, Stable Release" Just so that we don't have to go back in time and Show More topics to check. Ed

Ed, sorry to hear you are in ICU, hope you mend fast. It seems to me that that you've expressed is entirely reasonable. I wholeheartedly agree with you about having a bug list and maybe more? The forum is a great place for posting a question, airing an opinion or asking for help. Collectively we answer where we can, offer opinions and guidance where we can or fell so inclined. The whole reason it works is down to the time we have and the interest we have in so contributiopn for no personal gain. I just passed my 1,000 mark in posts and I am humbled by the time many others spend on here - when do they sleep? I have worked in IT for a long time, mostly as a project manager. It is a world where you are accountable to others and they expect timeframes for deliverables. That is commercial reality. I have been here from the grandfathering in days, I see the core team is growing, usage is expanding and maybe we need more structured communications about the state of 'things'. If we use BT for apps and have customers relying on us, then in turn, any kind of expectation management is great. I used to have a boss from Texas who would say 'When you are up to your *rse in alligators, it is hard to think about draining the swamp, which is where I think things are today. I know it is really hard when you are coding 20 hours a day to do all the comms too, so this kind of responsibility must not rely on David. I don't have any insight into how the core team is organised, but I think that is where the answers need to come from. To me it pretty much comes down to that some form of structured communication is needed that is more than this forum. A bug list would at the very least help manage our understanding of what does and doesn't work and what is being done. Or a wiki? Members only? Alan

From your hospital bed? Ed you are HARD CORE! Seriously hope things are ok and you get back on your feet and soon. Alan DEAD ON! I am using your Texas quote from now on :) Buzztouch Growing pains don't cha just LOVE THEM!

Get well man. Stick with it, you've got a ton of skills and some awesome resources to share here. Great contributions, esp in the area of marketing. I think the last 'major' bug was just quashed earlier this week - the child item fix. But there seems to still be a lot of small bugs with individual plugins - but these are all plugins created by 3rd party developers I believe. If you simply just build apps using what were the standard BT plugins (these are authored by David) - you should be able to still build apps without issues today- But 3rd party code that enhances BT and adds more functionality to your apps is where the magic is at. That's what makes your app not look like a cookie cutter app. But the problem with this code is that it is very specific and generally designed/tweeked to work for individual app functionality. (I still mod the 3rd party plugins myself to suit my needs.) >>> build directly in xcode... I cannot recommend trying this more. Download some sample apps and look at them, see how they are constructed and you'll learn 2 things- 1) BT is not that much different 2) All the extra code in a BT app is simply so that it has a back end to talk to AND so you can manipulate screens and control navigation with JSON using the web based control panel. That is the MAIN reason David built "BT" to begin with - so people could have a back end and navigation control without coding it every time they started a new app project. This is what really replaces "Storyboards" that 'standard' iOS apps use. Totally agree with you that some bug tracking would be great aside from this forum. Have some faith - the BT crew does read and digest these suggestions and they have implemented a lot user suggested improvements. We're the ones that asked for the plugin market to evolve as it has and for more functionality in the SH panel. They delivered. BT is a constant work in progress which is really the best thing about the platform :)

A bouquet and a barb @Atrain53 A Bouquet - Alongside having a list, we could have them classified (e.g. as major and maybe minor, showstopper etc). Good idea. A Barb - @Atrain53, no disrespect, but I am surprised that you think there is only one major bug remaining. LOL.

I don't fault the BT team and the release of the v3.0 core, it is the 3rd party plugins which work great with the Apps I started with v2.1.9 and I could just release those. But when you're dealing with high-end clients the expectation to under promise and over deliver especially when there are huge agencies with more resources can outdo me with a simple hey your App is iOS6 and should be iOS7. I love our community of developers helping developers, the morphine must be wearing off. I think today will be my marathon of xcode5 iOS video tutorials online.

Ed, I hope you are better soon. I know how frustrated you are with Buzztouch. Everyone on the forum has been where you are now, with a desire that exceeds current offering. It is the price of admission. Buzztouch has allowed all of us to be a part of their Beta Testing Team. Rather than wait the months to work out all of the bugs or charge us a $100 a month and increase their resources, they share their dream warts and all. Buzztouch could dummy down their offering so only people wanting to create basic apps would be served, most of us may not be members. It is always unpredictable and scary in Beta Testing, but that is what App Development is. The plugin market is a little like the wild west right now but it will settle down in time. Very few companies allow you to be a part of the development team. It is the price we pay to create apps in the Control Panel. If it was my income stream I would learn or partner with someone that can work in XCode. I could not build a business plan around a 3rd Party Beta product that will be in constant evolution. Buzztouch is what it is. If it was closer to perfect it would cost much more and may not be as much fun. Just my thoughts for whatever they are worth. Get well soon. Mike

@mike, i agree, in los angeles it's very competitive to be that solo successful guy when there are so many digital agencies, fighting for the same clientele. I hate stumbling blocks when you start on this high share it with a non tech understanding client, then fall short, they expect you to be the expert they're paying me for. Well got my headphones on, pretty nurses taking my vitals, watchin ios7 xcode5 tutorials, all is good.

@Ed, Sorry to hear you're laid up, hope you're getting better. You have expressed the frustration I've also been feeling lately. It seemed to start around the time of iOS7, some plugins and functions started acting wonky and we were told "BTv3 will take care of these issues," so expectations were set high. I've given up on BTv3. I spent days trying to get plugins to download with the sourcecode. And I'm not talking about 3rd-party plugins, I can't get "Custom HTML/Text", "Share via Email" David Book's own plugins to download. And little things like there's no instruction pdf with BTv3 are troublesome. When I post a question on the forum, BTers are quick to help based on their experience or best guess, but none of the suggestions have helped with v.3 core, so I'm dead in the water. And there's no way (that I know) to report a problem - Is it a bug that BT should know about? Is it just me? Maybe Buzztouch knows about it and is working on it? Maybe someone has noticed the post, maybe not. I don't think I'm expecting anything more than what was promised when I signed up, but that wasn't that Buzztouch is just a 3rd party beta product full of warts - and that's the price I have to pay.

@shenry There's no denying that Buzztouch has tremendous value and potential, as developers and Appreneurs, like David said in the Buzztouch Educators webinar, that the core take away is that its about transparency and using bt will expose you to xcode and eclipse sdk ios and android language. it's up to us as individuals to know what they know and do what they do. So taking this downtime to learn these languages in detail will at least answer my own questions. I think for the commited and dedicated BT devs here, it would be helpful to get a clear roadmap as to where buzztouch is heading, I've been down this road before, i mean it's OK if there aren't enough man hours or team members able to tackle these issues and finalize a stable release. If the roadmap means going from 2.19 to 3 to another release, at least we can forecast what we use buzztouch for. is it our primary app dev tool or our backup or for testing and learning. IMO, This is my breakdown on what can be done with the price we pay. 1. be like buzztouch setup a self hosted server, white label it, market diy app creation services, charge a membership fee, allow your customers to create their own Mobile Apps. you provide the support 2. be like buzztouch setup a self hosted server, white label it, market custom mobile app development to your customers, charge for dev cost, charge for hosting cost and you provide the support 3. use buzztouch to create your own apps to market and monetize 4. use buzztouch as an open source learning or training tool 5. if you're a seasoned plugin developer, utilizing the plugin marketplace to generate revenue maybe more profitable in the long run, best example is the envato marketplace, build a highly usable wordpress template ie. the Avada theme and in a few years having thousands of downloads you've made millions off of something you created once that as themeforest attracts new web developers every day their best bet is to buy the best and most stable theme. Be the first to create a unique plugin in the marketplace, set a decent price point, and as new bt members join looking for their building blocks, asking themeselves, should i start from scratch or make a purchase. i started when there were 71 plugins, and purchased close to $100 worth. good money for bt plugin developers. i'm just not there yet to do this on my own or compete with our fellow friends. but it only takes a handful of very useful plugins that newbies will make the impulse buy, for a plugin developer to make decent income. Then comes the newley formed BT Educators group where a goal is to create plugins to help educators build apps, i posed the question will we be selling them, Captain Book's opinion is that the plugins should be free, so it doesn't come across like were trying to benefit financially. I totally agree. But here lies the problem I forsee, If theres a paid plugin in the marketplace, say mosaic, and the bt educators group thinks it could be usefull for educators to use in teaching app building to students, do you then offer it for free, remove features and create a free lite version? Same in reverse you're a bt educators group contributor, you create an awesome plugin like flash cards, do you offer it for free, then you think, hey maybe there may be uses for my plugin in the marketplace that i may otherwise generate revenue from. ok time for my mri, just my thoughts. all is good

Get well soon! Cheers! -- Smug

Ed, I hope you are better soon. I know how frustrated you are with Buzztouch. Everyone on the forum has been where you are now, with a desire that exceeds current offering. It is the price of admission. Buzztouch has allowed all of us to be a part of their Beta Testing Team. Rather than wait the months to work out all of the bugs or charge us a $100 a month and increase their resources, they share their dream warts and all. Buzztouch could dummy down their offering so only people wanting to create basic apps would be served, most of us may not be members. It is always unpredictable and scary in Beta Testing, but that is what App Development is. The plugin market is a little like the wild west right now but it will settle down in time. Very few companies allow you to be a part of the development team. It is the price we pay to create apps in the Control Panel. If it was my income stream I would learn or partner with someone that can work in XCode. I could not build a business plan around a 3rd Party Beta product that will be in constant evolution. Buzztouch is what it is. If it was closer to perfect it would cost much more and may not be as much fun. Just my thoughts for whatever they are worth. Get well soon. Mike

Ed, Sounds like you have better things to do, lol. I hope everything is going as good as can be wherever you're at. Get Well! We need you running at full speed around here to keep motivation and moral high. I'm glad I came into this thread and read all the comments. I can't always read every post, and sometimes the subjects are misleading so I have to pick and choose. I'm glad this post beckoned me to read. As always, I understand everyone's concerns and frustrations. When the BTv3 core came out, it certainly had its gotchas. And we're knocking them all out as quick as we can. I've enlisted some more help to comb through the BT plugins to make sure they work as expected. As always, if you find something specific that does not work, feel free to PM me directly with something specific. As for the "3rd Party" plugins, I've addressed that in my epic 2013 manifesto last week, lol. I hope the plugin developers are working hard to make sure their bugs are fixed as well. I know they are. Keep in mind, we purposely kept all the existing Buzztouch pre-3.0 workflow available in your control panel. You can still grab the 2.0 flavored project and compile it in Xcode 4.6ish and submit to Apple. If your livelihood relies on Buzztouch, then hopefully you still remember how to do that. Granted, it may not be ios7 compliant out of the box. Apple made a lot of changes to this whole industry with their latest ios version (new OSX, new Xcode, new SDK, etc). So it take a lot of manpower to keep up with that (and Android at the same time...) To get back to Ed's original question... Bug reports. Lets try this..... After I hit submit on this post, I will create another post simply titled "BT3.0 Bug Report" (easy to search for later). -In this thread, you can type out any specific bugs that you find. -To keep the thread from going too crazy, please do not reply back with something like "I can't get that to work either". That will just bloat the thread and make it useless. -If you have a definite fix for someone's reported bug, feel free to reply with a detailed description of how you fixed it. Preface the fix with something easy to find such as: FIX FIX FIX FIX FIX FIX Without currently having any professional bug reporting system setup, this will have to do for now. I'd rather spend resources on fixing the product than setting up a better bug report. We'll see how much we can get accomplished with the simple forum report first. Right now for us, fixing the bugs is much easier than keeping track of them all. We've wasted a lot of resources lately tracking down bugs that aren't really there (i.e. someone downloading a v3.0 core project and compiling it for ios6 with Xcode 4.6 and reporting all kinds of errors). So here we go. I'm hitting Submit. Keep an eye out for the new post, and help us get past this extended "Beta" period! -Chris

@Chris Hey Thanks so much for making this effort! I greatly appreciate it! I'm getting better each day. Thanks to all for the get well wishes. On another note: I've got a HUGE surprise for the BT Community, did I say HUGE! Consider it my Holiday gift to everyone at buzztouch going into 2014. OMG I'm excited again! I am so on a roll, must be all these antibiotics, my created juices are flowing. It's going to be another Shock and Awe moment! Ho Ho Ho!

Hi Ed Looking forward to seeing what you are up to... but get well first!

@Dusko Thanks man, being a cancer survivor twice and under going stem cell transplant, being in the hospital year after year is like a second home to me, literally. In that time what I know what works for me in my recovery is to get excited, stimulate those endorphin's, break open my laptop and be creative. I heal faster when the adrenalin kick's in. Plus get rest when needed. If I rest all day, I feel I wasted valuable time and my body lays dormant relying too much on the meds. I'll be sending out private beta invites in the next day or two, I just finished building the infrastructure, now I'm populating it with content. I'll post a new topic about it soon.

Glad to hear you are on the energy curve! I have been collecting fixes for BT v3 with plugins and the Core. If you are interested in making your own patches, I can forward those emails. PM me with your email address. Be hearing from you soon! :-) -- Niraj