Looks like everyone has said everything I'd like to say so I won't say it... syke! Dang this is the hardest thing I ever had to navigate in all my years. Feel like a kid again and not in a good way.. I'm inside one of those glass house mazes and keep hitting the same wall ("Back to dashboard") who did we upset?!
The first 2 weeks was simply Nexus admins posting about things not working correctly. After that, Google was able to locate the forum. In the interim, I had been hoping PC-DMIS had migrated to the video game modding community known as Nexus. Unlimited ammo, or different themes would have been cool.
On the positive side: Code blocks are looking way better compared to the old forum. Would be great if the admins added syntax highlighting in the future.
Hexagon's website(s), in general are really opaque and difficult to navigate. They've lost boatloads of sales because I can't find hardware on their website, so I just order off EBay, Q-Mark, or fabricate things like probe racks myself. Only exception was when one of their salesmen happened to cold call seconds before I ordered $4,000 of stylus holders elsewhere.
I personally prefer database programs such as Calypso or Quindos, but regardless, it was critical to have had one person in charge of high-level planning and testing. Unfortunately, because that was not done many years ago, it's far too late to fix things now.
One example of a linear program disadvantage is the way PC-DMIS slows down dramatically whenever large numbers of points are used in features (it seems to be recalculating EVERYTHING; make a change to CIR_5003 and PC-DMIS reprocesses all the way back to datum A, which can take many minutes with a large program, where Calypso or Quindos only thinks about CIR_5003, which takes a split-second).
One example of poor program management is inconsistency in data entry field ("Spacer" on a circular path entered as radius, but swith to TTP circle, now you enter as diameter. Why?).
One example of legacy mistakes being impossible to correct is rotation about axis' in some fields such as alignments. Rotate +80 degrees about X-positive should be the same as rotating -80 degrees about X-negative. It's not. If they were to fix the code now, thousands of legacy programs would no longer work. That mistake should NEVER have left some long-gone programmer's desk, let alone released to market.
