[Jaxel]

I find the programming behind VB4 is definately TOP NOTCH. However, as you implied in your post, implementation of many elements and styles are sorely lacking. In the past, I have yelled at Jelsoft for their poor implementation of social groups and user albums. Putting social groups into a "category cloud" is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard; when it comes to social groups, you would new groups to get discovered, but a "cloud" system made it much harder for "discovery". Discovery is what social networking is all about.

Then of course there were issues with the user albums; there was no easy way to browse the library of user albums. There were workarounds by editing some code, giving everyone the right to post ONE picture, and then setting the history timetable in the years. But now it appears that many of these options are gone, and now the user album system is in a worse state then before. Especially since there is no pagenav at the bottom of the user album page.

While I can clearly see that IB knows what they are doing with programming, they don't seem to know much about user activity, user interaction, social networking or discovery. Its clear they programmed the forums first, and worked on the interface as an afterthought. This kind of problem is the single reason why, as a programmer, I always work in the user interface first (using test data of course), and then build the programming behind it to suit the needs of my users.

Do I think VB4 merits a gold status? Actually? Yes... but I dont think it merits the cost of $280.