broken Eagle-Fusion link

[roambotics_scott]

We're transitioning away from F350 / Eagle so do with this what you will, but we are at the end of our last project with PCBs designed in Eagle, and we are to the point where our client is about to write a ≈ $200k check for mold tooling, and for final design validation we need to send STEP files of one of our PCBs to the design firm doing the plastics, but it is now impossible to actually open the design that we just synced because of brittle versioning, and it can't be opened until F350 is updated in the Mac App Store.

Aside from being terrible, it's almost comical that you're going out of your way to ensure that people not use your tools in time-critical production environments. If I had any reservations about dumping F350, this has exorcised them.

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @roambotics_scott,

Download Fusion360 straight from Autodesk. Do not use the App Store download it has proven to give us nothing but problems. We will probably be removing ourselves from the Mac App store very soon.

http://www.appstreaming.autodesk.com/install/app/73e72ada57b7480280f7a6f4a289729f/

Download this one and let me know if it gives you anymore trouble.

Best Regards,

Jorge Garcia 

[roambotics_scott]

Hi Jorge,

Apple / macOS has a release and update process for good reasons. Updating Eagle is a bad experience and that could be fixed if you'd switch to their process Removing yourselves from the app store isn't a good move. Fixing your stuff to work with their process and schedule would be.

Best,
~ Scott

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @roambotics_scott,

When you need to release fixes quickly to customers the delay for Apple to approve an update is unacceptable. You've already mentioned you need to get this done ASAP, I don't want Apple's release process stopping you. You have nothing to lose by updating directly through Autodesk, if we wait on the App store you may lose a $200K check. 

I'm not a decision maker here, but I know the Mac app store has only caused problems for the Fusion-EAGLE integration. When we were Cadsoft we never supported the Mac app store(or rather they didn't accept us 🙂 ) it wasn't a problem back then, I'd wager it wouldn't be a showstopper now.

Try it, if you still have issues we can keep working through this. I want you to get your money.

Best Regards,

Jorge Garcia

[roambotics_scott]

Apple's release process isn't stopping me. F350's brittle versioning is. There is no reason that the versioning should be so unstable at this point that there would be regular breaking changes with that make files mutually incompatible between point releases of what by this point should be a very mature program.

I appreciate that you're offering a work-around here, but that is all it is - a work-around. I'm telling you that your programs are broken and you're handing me a roll of duct tape.

For the sake of argument, lets assume that I'm wrong and being unreasonable here* - just from a customer service perspective, the right thing to do isn't to tell me that what I perceive to be a problem isn't one, or to hand me a clunky patch to work around that problem.

That you need to issue emergency updates to patch issues with any regularity isn't a knock on the app store approval process, it's a knock on Autodesk's testing and release process. I get that it's a pain to wait for app store approval, but you're living on the platform, and asking users to bend over for you and manually download and install updates when there is a cryptographically signed standard update process built right into the OS is insanity.

It's true that Eagle never lived in the app store, but Eagle predates the App Store. That Autodesk was in the position to acquire CadSoft should tell you that their revenues and resources were dwarfed by yours. Part of the story in your acquisition was that you'd bring the clunky old software into the 21st century, and magical background updating consistent with the OS guidelines** is part of that.

You might as well be telling me that people used to cross the country in carriages and that was never a problem so why do I want to be able to take a plane.

Autodesk isn't some piddly, resource constrained startup. F350 and Eagle aren't brand new programs hot off the presses. That you can't manage these releases and that you'd actually have the nerve to insist that users be inconvenienced and annoyed for every update to save your developers a little nuisance and wait is staggering.

I'm not trying to be an a-hole here, and as I've said repeatedly, you've already long since lost me as a customer or advocate for any of your software, but I'm telling you these are major problems that are currently losing you many customers who are too polite to speak up as I am, or who just accept being flicked in the forehead periodically as part of life. On the at this point exceedingly off chance you or anyone in the company ever starts looking back and wondering what you're doing wrong and what you could do to turn things around, his interaction perfectly exemplifies everything wrong with how more or less every interaction I've had with anyone on the F350 or Eagle team. You're nice enough, but there is an underlying tone of a head pat, a dismissal of the very real problem I've presented, and then an offer of a patchwork fix that should at most be a temporary and embarrassing stand-in, but which Autodesk seems to have adopted as the SOP.

* I'm not

** as well as storing configuration and document files according to OS requirements, which neither F350 nor Eagle do

[roambotics_scott]

PS I didn't even bother complaining about this because I knew it'd be pointless, but yesterday for about an hour I couldn't push any updates to my PCB to F350 because (as I later found out with a text editor) there were a couple of trivial issues in the .brd XML that caused the pushes to fail with a 500 error and no hint of what was wrong or how to fix it (and I have to imagine that almost any non-technical user would never have been able to work around this, so, I'd wager that you have many frustrated users out there silently gritting their teeth at these errors and redoing work)

[jorge_garcia]

Hi @roambotics_scott,

I apologize if in any way my tone came off as dismissive. I wasn't trying to be, the App store thing can be argued for days on end and frankly my goal here is not to say whether we should be on the App store or not. Did you try the download and were you able to get your work done? That's my main interest here if that's settled then we can continue.

We are aware of the issues with the current Fusion360 implementation and thanks for reporting the HTTP issue you ran into. That one has personally infuriated me since the current system doesn't give feedback as to what went wrong. These things are currently being worked in a very big way, in a manner unlike what has been done before. I know what you're thinking "I've heard this before..." and I don't doubt that you have. The rest of this year will either prove me a liar or show that something has been finally done to address some of these longstanding issues. It's true that what I gave you right now is a workaround, but it's a solution and one that hopefully gets you over this final hump with us.

You've mentioned multiple times that we've lost you as a customer, however the fact that you continue to interact and post is telling me something else. I commend you on your desire to see things get corrected and improved and I hope you'll continue to check in every once in a while to see how things have developed.

Let me know if there's anything I can do for you, especially on the EAGLE side since that's my bread and butter.

Best Regards,

[roambotics_scott]

I appreciate that, Jorge.

I was able to download it and (almost) export the PCB but despite having gone back to the managed library for myself, I still can't control some of the 3D packages so there is one in a place that it shouldn't be and I can't delete it or otherwise do anything about it..

For the record, I'm right on the app store. That's not arrogance or inability to see your perspective, it's just objectively the way it should work from the end-user perspective. You could always build a kernel app that is very tight and rarely updated that lives in the app store that somehow handles downloading updates itself, but that is a silly amount of work, probably violates their app store rules, and the right answer is obvious - get ahead of your release schedule, test things to death internally and externally, then push builds to the public exclusively through the app store. Things won't happen instantly and people will complain that they don't have the latest and greatest yesterday, but you'll have a stable, usable product that magically updates itself as it should.

I have no doubt that you mean what you say, but I also know that Phil and Srinath and Keqiang and Carl and‥ also meant it when they said the same sorts of things. It's not a matter of intention or will, it's all about the ability to execute, and this isn't a knock on you, but I gather that there are deep seated, systematic issues embedded in the company that make it exceedingly difficult to change things even with the best of intentions.

The HTTP issue I (and presumably you) saw isn't an HTTP issue, it's an XML parsing issue. Something is choking on it on the EC2 server, and then it fails with an HTTP 500 (internal server) error.

For what it's worth, it's completely typical and indicative of the sort of issues I'm sure are everywhere within the code both on the server and client side of F350 and Eagle. Independent of knowing a bit of what's going on behind the scenes, I can smell from it that you're outsourcing your development to India, and that if there even is an automated test suite, it's missing a lot of obvious edge cases so almost worse than not having one at all because it's making you feel warm and fuzzy without actually doing anything.

I told everyone on the F350 this before, but if you really care about this stuff, and mean what you say, and you're empowered to do so, you should freeze development for 6-9 months and put all developers on QA and bug identification / fixing, ideally with some senior people who know enough about data structures and algorithms and software reliability to identify things that smell bad and know how to fix them.

I've said it many times, but I desperately want to like F350 and Eagle because at the moment there is no other viable software for doing design in macOS. If the two fully merged and you had something stable that actually works as well as Fusion promises but never delivers, or at least it ever becomes clear that you're genuinely heading in that direction, I'll reconsider (though at this point you not only have to do the above and be amazing, you now have to be better than Altium and Solid Works to get me back).

Do a development freeze, fix your release cycle, and switch to regularly using lots of naive testers, and I'm willing to put in some time and give you lots of feedback if it starts genuinely looking like you're heading someplace good because (as I've said many times) F350 is consistently *almost* amazing, but never quite gets there even beyond just being Mac native. I'd love to see you get there, and I'd be thrilled if Eagle evolved into something where it's a fully 3D native, hyper-intuitive PCB layout and design system.

I'm just not at all optimistic about your stuff ever getting there because there are so many sunk costs and so much momentum toward doing things certain ways that it'll be exceedingly difficult for you to actually make the choices that will pull these things out of the fire.