Randy

As said before I have no concerns about the use of snooping, gawd only knows how many programs do it. Daily boot and I have to send a bunch of them to hell.

I am quite concerned about dropping MC features. I might use something once a year but I like to be able to depend on it being there. The code is done and works, hide it on the UI under a twisted_user or rabid_ferret menu. Some of us would really appreciate it.

jeffD

Randy

As I said before, You can find out for example that people are not using Waterline, or some other feature, as much as you expected, but the fact is that you don’t know why that happens !
You can only guess.
It can be a million things!

- It can be harder to understand.
- It can be named and presented in such a way that people get it differently than what it is, so they fail to use it.
- It can have a bug making it unusable.
- Some user CAM jobs, may never required a specific operation.
- Some users, may prefer one operation over the others, due to the finish it provides, or time it takes to compute, or some other factor.

And what is worse in all this guessing work, is that, the least used feature, might be what the users want the most, and vise versa.
And there is no way to know, except asking the users.

By the way, another option for feedback, is to make available a poll, either on the website or/and inside the application.
However, note that you must be careful how you phrase the question, or the results may give you meaningless info too.

A I said before, You can find out for example that people are not using Waterline, or some other feature, as mcuh as you expected, but the fact is that you don’t know why that happens !
You can only guess.
It can be a million things!
- It can be harder to understand.
- It can be named and presented in such a way that people get it differently than what it is, so they fail to use it.
- It can have a bug making it unusable.
- Some user CAM jobs, may never required a specific operation.
- Some users, may prefer one operation over the others, due to the finish it provides, or time it takes to compute, or some other factor.

And what is worse in all this guessing work, is that, the least used feature, might be what the users what most, and vise versa.
And there is no way to know, except asking the users.

By the way, another option for feedback, is to make available a poll, eiter on the website or/and inside the application.
However, note that you must be careful how you phrase the question, or the results may give you meaningless info too.

Very true. I expect to only turn this on for a while just to see what’s going on. 4th axis is a good example of a feature that I have little information about- are people using it? Are the people using it trial users that are not buying because it’s not feature-rich enough? Are people using the waterline and pencil toolpaths or just using parallel because they’re easier to understand?

I want the typical MeshCAM usage to be completely streamlined and then make sure that the unused functions are moved out of the way.

I consider this to be a way to figure out what commands and functions are being used but I do not expect to get any context out of it. I like your idea and that may be a better long-term strategy to help with support and feedback and to get that missing context.

-Robert

From my experience, it’s a lot better to supply and support a direct connection from the application, so the user can report problems directly, when they occur.
If the user is really interested, he will imput valuable feedback, to contextualize the error or situation he found.

Better yet, is to support a live connection to support, directly inside the aplication, like a chat, or the best a graphical application view (remote support). However, this takes a heavy toll on support, specially on small teams, worse in one man teams, including discrepancy of users in this global market, where half the world is sleeping when the other half is awake.

Check out DBSchema (http://www.dbschema.com), and see the “report bug” feature, for an example.

User can report a problem, and automatically include a part of the application log, that is clearly visible and can even be edited, if you think there is something that shouldn’t be sent.

Randy

-Robert

I have no problems with the concept although I might be twisting the data as much as Randy.
Get too many of us and the data will have no basis in reality

jeffD