Notebook 10.8 for Mac

[Greg Port]

Is anyone else having the huge problems I am having with this software? It crashes all the time and is so unstable, its like working with a quail egg and is so frustrating. After contacting Smart support they said they knew about the problems and they would be fixed in the next release of the software in spring 2012. Thanks a lot for that!

 

[VV]

Yes, we have had multiple issues here, so we just downgraded our teachers to version 10.6. :(  Not very happy with SMART right now.

[Greg Port]

Thanks for that... it seems such a shame that they release software without really testing it. I just don't get that! It makes me look so bad as I am the one who said we should get Smartboards.

[Obe Hostetter]

Typically with any new software release, it is best to wait 6 months after it has been released before installing it.  That way hopefully, most of the bugs are gone.  

 

We are using the older version of Notebook 10.7.   Download from http://www.smarttech.com/us/Support/Browse+Support/Download+Softwar...

[Vickie Powell]

Uh oh...I'm home on sick leave recovering from shoulder surgery and we are using SMART Notebook/Response 10.8 at school and on my laptop at home.  What problems are you noticing?  I'm not connected to an actual SMARTBoard at home, obviously, so I'm not having any problems--that I'm aware of anyway.  We are running Mac OS 10.6 at school.

I LOVE the fact that this version allows teachers to make the background transparent but the tools stay on screen--nice if you are running SMART Response Clickers and want a Brain Pop quiz to appear in place of the white Notebook background. Don't have to keep switching from one window to the other.

It also puts the SMART Response icon in the Full Screen toolbar. :-)

[Greg Port]

There a few features which are nice - but that is all for nothing if it crashes all the time unfortunately! It happens at random times - saving, adding a flash file, exporting, changing pages. About 3 or 4 times a day for me.

[Greg Port]

Hi Obe... see I just don't get this! Would a car manufacturer start selling a car that would blow up randomly or the wheels fall off at any given time? NO WAY - they would spend hundreds, even thousands of hours testing it rigourously so they would not damage their reputation when their new car exploded on someone. Yeah I know, our lives are not at risk here (well when I am up teaching and Notebook crashes then my lesson dies!) but the reputation of the company is. Why not the same process of careful testing - give the software to 100 people and ask them to try it out and see if there are any problems and fix them before releasing it.

I may be idealistic, but I think we should demand better.

[Adam Denenberg]

Greg make sure you are not using 10.8 with Lion, it is not compatible and will be very unstable.

[Greg Port]

I am using 10.6.8 - so no Lion. Thanks :)

[Matt Granger]

I was going to talk about this issue on the last SBRGVUG meeting, but we had issues with the free service I was using and never got to it.

 

This isn't analogous to a car. These are different companies releasing software. One can change something in the architecture of their software, change the way something has worked for a while, and it breaks the other. It happened not too long ago when Adobe upgraded Flash. The SMART Response Teacher Tools software, build on Flash, was suddenly broken.

 

I asked the SMART tech support gentlemen who frequent the community here about this because someone else asked me about it in an email. Here is the response:

 

"

Hi Matt,

I'm currently in the midst of getting a bit more information for you regarding this situation on what to expect, but what I know I can tell you is that the official support for Mac will start in Spring 2012, coinciding with the release of the next Education Software bundle.

 The reasoning for this is that we needed to take more time and effort investment into testing this software to ensure that everything works properly on a *public* release of the Mac OSX 10.7, allowing for optimal experiences.  

 

While I'm not the one who made the decision being in Technical services and all, I can totally relate to why it happened.  When we were testing SynchronEyes 7  and SMART Sync 2009 software with development versions of Windows Vista, we found that the final version of Vista threw all of our results out the window, no pun intended, and we ended up going full circle on having to retest our software.

 

We have committed to a patch which we expect to be available at the end of October/early November.  This patch is to address most of the Lion related issues that have been identified so far, especially a memory leak bug that was causing many Mac users running 10.8 to crash."

 

This is what we know. Just like the Adobe situation, they had the same problem with Windows Vista. Even though they had the developer version for testing, and made sure SynchronEyes and SMART Sync worked with it, when the official release came, much of their work was for naught.

 

They had Notebook 10.8 set to release in July. Apple also released Lion in July. Two major upgrades seem destined to have issues. Thankfully, they are working on the patch described above. If I hear anything else on a release of that, I'll pass it along.

 

[VV]

Thanks Matt for that information.  :)

[Ann Zimmer]

Hearing that from a lot of folks. I heard the service patch was coming out in oct. As a smart Mac user I have decided not to go to 10.8 for awhile

[Dean]

Think I'm seeing a pattern here. We have users creating files on the latest PC version of Notebook and then having crashing issues on our Macs. Can I take it that 10.7 may resolve transfer issues?