Rhapsody 4 has this annoying bug: If you’re running on a dual head setup, and you maximize Rhapsody on the non-primary head, then minimize it, then restore it, it restores to the primary head, not the one it was previously on. Minimizing and restoring a window should never change it’s position on screen.
Anyhow, so I want to be a helpful user and report the bug to them. Seems very easy to reproduce and probably fairly easy to fix (I wrote some code for VMware ACE that did something somewhat similar. It’s like 3 Windows API functions). After poking around on Rhapsody’s poorly designed website, all I could find was a “contact customer suppport” link which took me to a page with a form to input a message to send to their system.
Ok, whatever, I fill it out with the simple question: “Where do I send bug reports?”
A day later, I get an automated response. I’ve been promoted to level 2 support due to the severity of my case.
Second day, I get a response from a human, pointing me at “this page”:http://real.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/real.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=6184&p_created=1159553728. Apparently all problems people have with Rhapsody are reported to the music-programming@real address. Doesn’t sound too encouraging. It also says you can also mention it in their forums.
Anyhow, the point is, I’m trying to help them make a better product here, but do they have to make it this hard to tell them about a simple bug? If there’s anything to be learned from Open Source projects is that transparency in terms of dealing with problems in your software will usually make people less annoyed about those problems.

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