C.

1) If I use a “favourite mailing” then it will NEVER auto-complete for me, I have to enter the address manually. I’ve given up trying to use favourites because of this, so as far as I’m concerned this part of the software effort was all a waste of time
2) Sometimes when I want to create a second mailing, the service gets changed – typically, it comes up as 39p instead of 61p – and it won’t let me edit the service to correct it, it steadfastly sets it back to 39p and I have to log right out to convince it that I want a large stamp.
3) I also had the same issue as a previous commenter re. return address length. Even after I convinced that to work, it frequently used to forget my return address from one session to the next, but that seems to be OK at the moment…touch the wood of the chief developer’s head…

Even on the few occasions it DOES work right it takes me far longer than it used to, with all those extra pages and button presses. WHY can’t it just remember the service and print format I used at the end of the last session?

I’ve also asked Royal Mail to PLEASE revert to the old, perfectly good interface – or at least offer it as a “classic” option – no response yet.

I strongly suspect that this is just a sneaky way of providing such a poor service that they entice customers off the free service and onto the paid SmartStamp service…

****************
We are aware of a technical issue when using Online Postage, however the
development team are working on the fault.
Please try using Online Postage later as the fault will be fixed as soon as
possible.
I apologise for the inconvenience this is causing you.
***************

Hilarious

The “new improved” online postage SUCKS! I can not believe that they released this to the public. Regarding Acrobat, try PDF-XChange viewer instead. It’s free and lightweight.

If the new online postage does not work, why don’t they just bring the old version back?

I appreciate the initiative to improve it, but so far it’s just one big headache with no real advantages over the old system!

At my last company we used Royal Mail’s SmartStamp system which installed on the desktop. When it worked it wasn’t too bad – you could print a page full of stamps on cheap labels or do a mail merge direct onto envelopes. But the software was flaky at best and you have to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of paying more to print stamps!

I disagree; I think objects should validate data. My favourite ORM, Propel, does an excellent job of this…

Namely, you can define validation rules on a per field basis (e.g. minlength, maxlength, regexp matches etc) and then you can optionally call $user->validate() before $user->save().

If you don’t call $user->validate() then your data will probably get saved (assuming there are no database constraints on fields which will result in a db exception being raised

When calling validate(), you can optionally ask it to validate only certain fields – allowing you to partially populate an object (e.g. on a multi-page form).

Finally, when validation fails, it doesn’t return an exception – validate() returns true/false; if it returns false, it’s up to you (the programmer) to call getValidationFailures() which returns a list of objects you can iterate over – each has teh field name and the validation failure message you specified in the schema.xml file.

Anyway, I like it – I’ve not yet looked at Doctrine in any depth, but don’t think it offers the same functionality (but I may be wrong).

David