Hey all,
this should be more a discussion basic than a de facto idea. It's all about "the rest of Fusion360" - means everything besides the actual software itself which is your Dashboard.
First of all let me state one important note that i beg to remember througout this post: I'm totally fine with cloud saving and handling of files and don't want to have anything completely offline. I just wanted to make this clear at the beginning.
...but 😉
After weeks of working with Fusion360 i can't get used to what you call the dashboard and the way files and other content gets handled. Though i get your idea i still feel completely uncomfortable when importing files, moving files around, renaming drawings,.. .well i think stuff that you do every day on normal software and you also do on cloud software. My main concern is the fact that the complete Web Application is more like simple web pages than what could be a web application in times of HTML5, CSS3 and modern JS. Pages sometimes load long, Popup windows even longer and don't even think of having a small network problem while you're trying to fiddle around in the dashboard.
I think there could be a way to handle this smarter. You should be able to create a web app that is fun to work with. A web app that is more of an application than a website. I know that data should be in sync asap and i also know that this is difficult to achieve but i also think (caution it's getting technical) it doesn't need page loads when clicking through folder structures. You sould load the structure (XML, json, whatever) and store it locally and only submit changes to the server. Then browsing could completely be done locally and when someone renames a files, creates a new one or whatever this could be sent to the server. Conflict handling should still be possible this way (.e.g. "renaming failed, someone else already renamed the file faster than you - go get some power ups to be faster next time"). Also all the UI stuff is of course great to do in HTML5 these days but this could all be stored locally and have only json calls or something else do the job to get fresh content data from the server or write data back to the server.
/end technical
This would make using Fusion360 a snap and not to be seperated from a completely local app. Data loading could much more be done in the background and there would be much less waiting for pages to load.
And if you're already there rebuilding the dashboard: Please update it's design too. Unfortunately it really looks like this early 21st century web portal software with left sidebar, content, right sidebar. Theres so great design ideas everywhere...
I hope you guys don't get that all wrong - you're doing such a great job and Fusion360 is way the best solution that i've seen so far (well at least for what i need) and the way you listen to users is just amazing and will be a good example for other ones that are far behind Autodesk in this part - i'm sure. I just hope to shake some minds with my post - i guess there's lots of room for improvement still and as good as we all are we can still get better.
