Forum behavior

Point taken. In interest of full disclosure I have suggested at every company I have worked for that they discontinue paying SMA's I am currently working with 3.7mr4 and happy as a clam to stay there so no I haven't logged any technical support issues in years if ever, what's the point support for my version stopped a long time ago. The next thing that will be said is since I did that I have no right to complain about the software bugs so why didn't I just keep my mouth shut, and to a point you may be right but here's the thing. I don't keep my SMA's up or even want to play with the new versions because it appears to me to be the business practice of HexMet to keep pumping out releases for the sole purpose of justifying holding their hands out for more SMA money. That I would have no problem with if I thought there were quality releases that enhanced the quality and output of my job but sadly there have been very few things that I feel do that in anything I have seen. Addmittedly I stopped even looking after 4.2. What I have seen is that every release that comes out is has introduced more issues and workarounds and steps that I have to take that actually impede my progress. That may be a case of old dog and new tricks but lets take a look at some of the things I have seen on the new releases that I have worked with. With the advent of 4.x PCD added the probe box method of auto feature control, as I understood it so PCD could expand into using more different methods of metrology, ie vision, lasers, cnc etc. Adding all of that into the software just got to be too much for the old style of auto features to handle so a change had to be made, ok that I get but explain a couple of things to me. How does it enhance my job to go from having all of the info I needed in one are to having to using seperate dialog boxes and several more tabs and layers I had to flip through to see things that I had readily available before all for the sake of adding functionality that a majority of users rarely if ever see? How much easier to make it to make more mistakes because things like material thickness settings, that are persistent in ways they never should be, are suddenly invisible unless more special steps are taken where they weren't before? Add to that the report templates which suddenly stopped printing out of tolerance dimensions in a different color than in tolerance dimensions making quick and accurate reading of reports impossible (BTW calls were made on that one and it couldn't be replicated but if you go back and look here, on the forum, I was not the only one with that problem). Or the xactmeasure tolerances that couldn't be viewed in the edit window so now I have to switch to other windows to see my results. Or all of the juggling that needs to be done to make the reports usable and a reasonable file size (burried nonsensical registry setting anyone, hidden right click menues that one pop up in special places anyone). On the plus side they did enhance the graphics and add a neat toolbar so that you didn't have to dig to change the views that I liked. Granted that only saved about 1% of what it cost in time but it was an enhancement. So yeah when B&S started taking the software away from what I was doing and I venture to say most people are doing with their machines I decided I didn't need to support new versions. From there each and every time a new version comes out it is shortly followed by a list of things that are no longer working right, some of them egregious errors that never should see the light of day, for instance the ctrl-e issues mentioned for both 2010mr3 and 2011. And please explain the here is 2010mr2, oh wait no it isn't, here it is thing.

So my issues aren't as much the software as it is the way you do business Brian, please tell me how do I open a support ticket for that? How do I call this one in to tech support seeing how I don't have a current SMA? I would further venture to say that most of the people complaining around here are far more frustrated with the manner in which HexMet is doing business than it is the software itself (also how those business practices extend to the way the forum is being run but that's a different issue that has been covered ad nauseum).

It was brough up and seconded by you that if we have problems with the way things are going then we should talk with our checkbooks, ok I have done that and I'm still in an empty room shouting, I have probably cost Hex more than 30 SMA renewalls over the years but no one cares, or ever has.

Further, I find the very idea that I, and other users (outside of your beta testers) should have to log tech support issues as insulting and offensive. It should be HexMet's responsibility to release a product that works, correctly, most of the time and not up to it's user base to be the ones to find and report issues, especially some a basic as some of the errors seen even in the error fix logs. We have all just gotten so used to it because that is what we have to do to do our jobs that somehow that became right.

Point taken. In interest of full disclosure I have suggested at every company I have worked for that they discontinue paying SMA's I am currently working with 3.7mr4 and happy as a clam to stay there so no I haven't logged any technical support issues in years if ever, what's the point support for my version stopped a long time ago. The next thing that will be said is since I did that I have no right to complain about the software bugs so why didn't I just keep my mouth shut, and to a point you may be right but here's the thing. I don't keep my SMA's up or even want to play with the new versions because it appears to me to be the business practice of HexMet to keep pumping out releases for the sole purpose of justifying holding their hands out for more SMA money. That I would have no problem with if I thought there were quality releases that enhanced the quality and output of my job but sadly there have been very few things that I feel do that in anything I have seen. Addmittedly I stopped even looking after 4.2. What I have seen is that every release that comes out is has introduced more issues and workarounds and steps that I have to take that actually impede my progress. That may be a case of old dog and new tricks but lets take a look at some of the things I have seen on the new releases that I have worked with. With the advent of 4.x PCD added the probe box method of auto feature control, as I understood it so PCD could expand into using more different methods of metrology, ie vision, lasers, cnc etc. Adding all of that into the software just got to be too much for the old style of auto features to handle so a change had to be made, ok that I get but explain a couple of things to me. How does it enhance my job to go from having all of the info I needed in one are to having to using seperate dialog boxes and several more tabs and layers I had to flip through to see things that I had readily available before all for the sake of adding functionality that a majority of users rarely if ever see? How much easier to make it to make more mistakes because things like material thickness settings, that are persistent in ways they never should be, are suddenly invisible unless more special steps are taken where they weren't before? Add to that the report templates which suddenly stopped printing out of tolerance dimensions in a different color than in tolerance dimensions making quick and accurate reading of reports impossible (BTW calls were made on that one and it couldn't be replicated but if you go back and look here, on the forum, I was not the only one with that problem). Or the xactmeasure tolerances that couldn't be viewed in the edit window so now I have to switch to other windows to see my results. Or all of the juggling that needs to be done to make the reports usable and a reasonable file size (burried nonsensical registry setting anyone, hidden right click menues that one pop up in special places anyone). On the plus side they did enhance the graphics and add a neat toolbar so that you didn't have to dig to change the views that I liked. Granted that only saved about 1% of what it cost in time but it was an enhancement. So yeah when B&S started taking the software away from what I was doing and I venture to say most people are doing with their machines I decided I didn't need to support new versions. From there each and every time a new version comes out it is shortly followed by a list of things that are no longer working right, some of them egregious errors that never should see the light of day, for instance the ctrl-e issues mentioned for both 2010mr3 and 2011. And please explain the here is 2010mr2, oh wait no it isn't, here it is thing.

So my issues aren't as much the software as it is the way you do business Brian, please tell me how do I open a support ticket for that? How do I call this one in to tech support seeing how I don't have a current SMA? I would further venture to say that most of the people complaining around here are far more frustrated with the manner in which HexMet is doing business than it is the software itself (also how those business practices extend to the way the forum is being run but that's a different issue that has been covered ad nauseum).

It was brough up and seconded by you that if we have problems with the way things are going then we should talk with our checkbooks, ok I have done that and I'm still in an empty room shouting, I have probably cost Hex more than 30 SMA renewalls over the years but no one cares, or ever has.

Further, I find the very idea that I, and other users (outside of your beta testers) should have to log tech support issues as insulting and offensive. It should be HexMet's responsibility to release a product that works, correctly, most of the time and not up to it's user base to be the ones to find and report issues, especially some a basic as some of the errors seen even in the error fix logs. We have all just gotten so used to it because that is what we have to do to do our jobs that somehow that became right.