new PM ?

[roambotics_scott]

[mounts high horse; very long rant ahead]

I feel like I've been harping about this forever.

F360 could be the design tool for hardware startups. It's nearly that good.

BUT

1) The thing crashes, all the time.

Apparently not for everyone, but certainly for me.

Every time I complain about it, I get the feeling of a pat on the head and an undertone of «it's you, not us», along with some BS about turning certain things off (which doesn't help and shouldn't ever be necessary; if they're that unstable, they shouldn't be in the product).

To be fair - Autodesk bought me a new MacBook Pro (because they thought my MacBook Air was at fault; hint: it wasn't) and they flew three people out to see me and rented an absurdly expensive conference room  and paid for comically expensive WiFi (Mariott, fwiw) to try to help.

Everyone was very nice but they asked me to start working (with what at least to me felt like an implication that I was exaggerating). I start and within five minutes triggered a crash (it didn't help that at the time the crash logger was broken and wasn't sending in reports for my plethora of crashes).

Suddenly the tone in the room changed from «this guy is just an exaggerating complainer» to «uh oh 😕 ».

As long as I've been using the product (almost from the beginning), there has been this whack-a-mole approach to fixing bugs.

Let me say in no uncrtain terms - if you're going to charge anything for an app, it should at least be stable.

If Word crashed like F360, nobody would use it

.. and can you imagine the response if Microsoft was telling people who complained about it crashing «it's not crashing for us / anybody else»?

Something is wrong and you need another approach.

I like that you keep pushing the envelope with features, but it's a bit of a slap in the face to see a bunch of things that are clearly half baked working their way into the product.

People on the team keep telling me that there is an overall strategy and arc.. which may be true, but I'm just not seeing it. 

There should be something built into the app's architecture at a low level that (a) catches hangs and potential crashes (b) rolls back to a working state, and (c) sends a crash report with enough information for QA to reproduce the event and repair it.

There are other threads about showing progress and letting users press escape to get out of a bad state. These should be done but they are symptoms of a common underlying problem.

Not a crash with data loss but almost as long as I've been using the app, there is something that would get me stuck into a weird state where I'm locked into orbit and can't escape without quitting and restarting the app.

This is awful and unacceptable. It's just as bad as a crash and should be triaged as such. It should have been understood and fixed permanently within a month of the first report.

Also / tangentially related - what ever happened to the ability to jump into orbit mode with a keyboard / finger chord on a trackpad ?!? It used to be possible to be working and immediately move the piece around, but now I have to monkey with the view cube. That may seem trivial / like not a big deal but if it just takes a second to jump from where I am to the cube, and another second to go back from the cube to what I was doing (not unrealistic numbers by my timing), then that's a minute wasted every 30 times I want to change my perspective (which is quite often).. and that's not factoring in the mental cost associated with context switching switching (which is not only quite significant but leads to frustration).

Nothing unnecessary should interrupt design flow or frustrate the user.

Fundamentally the app should be built around making things quickly and painlessly.

Every time someone has to go to a menu, move to a widget, re-enter parameters in a dialog box, recover from a crash, restart the app to get out of some weird mode, you're burning people's time, motivation, and their good will.

You're charging people up to $1,800 / seat / year for this application for an application that still feels like a nice beta / proof-of-concept that's still not close to production quality.

The cloud constantly being in the middle is a horrible architectural choice that you should fix.

I can forgive the application for being imperfect, but not for being unusable (or / closer to my experience - usable, but with great pain and frustration).

In contrast, look to Adobe's Creative Cloud. The applications are great, polished, actually work offline, and they are only enhanced by cloud connectivity and not handicapped by its absence. At the high end, they're charging $600 / seat / year for a whole suite of production quality apps that work consistently and well.

I've complained about this IdeaStation before but as much as I like a place to vent, using votes to determine what to work on is just a symptom of not having a good compass. Use it to learn what people want, but don't wait for something that obviously should be done to get a ton of up-votes before considering it (and don't blindly try to do things that are exceedingly popular but don't fit into the overarching vision).

If there is a lot of demand for some feature then by all means add it to the roadmap, but don't blow with the wind, and don't design the thing by committee. 

You need one person with a clear vision managing the thing who cares deeply about it, who will fix things and who will guide you in the right direction.

If you just took what's in there now, added no features, and in ~6-9 months came back with something that worked reliably without the nusiances, and without any new features (save for fleshing out the ones that are half baked), it'd be a solid product and I'd not hesitate to recommend it to people.

.. but it stands, I find myself recommending it very infrequently, and even when I do because it fits someone's particular needs, I only recommend it with a lot of hesitation, a slew of serious caveats, and an apology. 

The only reason that I still bother with this program is that it's native(ish) on OS X, it's cheap(ish), and it's so very close to being really / truly great.

..or it could just be a footnote.

Your choice.