Thoughts on 5.0

[RichardU]

Since it's no longer beta, I hope this is the correct forum.

I just installed 5.0 on a spare machine to give it a try. Here is my feedback.

The tree paradigm made me think, oh, great I have dozens of programs with trees, I know how these work. Except not. Unlike all my other tree programs that use a single click (e.g. windows explorer) CQC requires a double-click to activate a node. And if the user does single-click on the tree, then the tree shows one thing while the viewer shows another. Even if the user double-clicks on the tree, if it's in an empty node the viewer continues to show the previous node. The end result of all this is, you can't trust the tree to indicate what you're looking at.

I had SystemCfg open, and I double clicked on it in the tree. Instead of bringing me to the SystemCfg view, it gave me an error: "Unhandled exception in GUI Thread."

For that matter, what's up with names like SystemCfg and LogicSrvr anyway? You have the room to spell it out.

I looked for the Elk driver under Security / Elk. Not there. Eventually found it under SmartPanel. Ugh.

I decided to wait and upgrade to 5.0 after some of the bugs are worked out, so I thought I would uninstall hoping to save my 40 days of trial for another attempt (which may or may not work). Control Panel, uninstall. Nope. Okay. Find the CQC ininstall. Run it. End up with a command window that says:

C:\Program Files (x86)\CQC\, Are you sure (Y/N)?

Enter y and I get:

The batch file cannot be found.

So, I'm really torn on how much to comment. On the one hand my Mother said, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." And I know this is your shiny new toy, that has required more than a year of eye-straining work.

On the other hands, if your friends won't say you have bad breath, who will?

So here goes. Every single aspect of this program (and predecessors) reeks of being designed for machine needs rather than human needs. A human interface would look more like:

What Do You Want To Control? / Where Is It?
How Do You Want To Control? / When. etc.

Even during the installation you offer the choice:

Master Server/Single Machine Setup
Non-Master Server Installation

Do you see how needlessly convoluted that is? Why is one is a Setup and another an Installation? What is a Non-Master Server? Don't you simply mean:

Install Master Server and Client
Install Client Only

I get that anyone who reads all the documentation will eventually understand what to do. It's technically correct. But not optimal. It could be really instructive to watch a computer-sophisticated newcomer deal with the process of setting up CQC.

Or maybe it's just me.

Your Friend, Richard

[Dean Roddey]

The way the browser tree works was much discussed and this is what was preferred. It's not just viewing things, so it shouldn't work like windows explorer. It works like pretty much all editor type programs of this sort do, in that you double click to edit something. Otherwise, just running the cursor down the list it would be obliged to open everything along the way if you take the approach that what is selected has to be opened. For directory listings that's reasonable. For a network distributed program editing complex data, it's not very practical.

Double clicking something that's already open is supposed to just bring that tab forward. There maybe something going on with the system config, so I'll take a look at it. Some number of small things like this were inevitably going to get through, and will be dealt with in a 5.0.1 followup.

As to the abbreviated spelling, once you get to using it, you'll appreciate the shorter names, because space is at a premium once you start editing touch screen interfaces, so being able to keep the browser size minimal is something most folks want. For 5.1 I hope to implement hover for the tree control, so that hovering over an item can give you more information. There just wasn't time for 5.0.


On the master/non-master, that was all new stuff, so the verbiage could be better. It's not master vs. client only though. It's master vs. non-master definitely. You can install server components on any machine, so any machine can be both a client and a server. I'll change them both to use the term Setup. There again, there was no way that all these little details were going to get caught first time out. Maybe I can make it three options, master, non-master, and client only.


BTW, it's assumed you will go through the tutorial videos, which will walk you through all of this stuff, and the first couple will get you through the install in ten minutes or so. It's just not reasonable for a new user to expect to install and set up a program of this power without at least doing the minimum exploration of the help resources provided, which the page they download it from points them to. This isn't Roomie, it's a serious automation system. I'm always happy to try to make it easier, which all of this was about, but in the end it's not a trivial program and that's why the videos were made.

[Dean Roddey]

OK, yes, there is an issue specifically with the system config being double clicked while it's still open. Other stuff works fine, it's just something about that one. I'll get it fixed for the next drop.

[Dean Roddey]

I fixed the system config re-double-click issue. It was a trivial issue. The tab was indicating it was a viewer type tab instead of an editor. When you click on it again, it was being looked for as the editor type tab it is, and wasn't being found because it was incorrectly marked. So the admin intf tried to create a new one, which would fail because it's now a duplicate.