You might forget that none of us actually build anything with Rhino - we spend our days sitting in front of compilers and email programs - so we NEVER see the problems you see.<
In a reply to another post, Brian from Mcneel wrote the above.
Surely there should be a group of “real” end users within the sphere of the company that are contracted to provide feedback to mcneel as they go about their jobs creating whatever it is they do…?
I understand that in part this is what you hope the people you sell the program to will do for you on these forums but feedback here is random in quality depending on the needs and levels of expertise of the users.
Supposing you contracted maybe 20 to 50 users in different disciplines among your user base to pass direct feedback to you, and whom you could also throw out stuff for discussion as you wanted?
You’d then get known reliable feedback from professional users, who would stay in the loop because you were paying (or otherwise rewarding them - eg free software etc) them to do so.
This might help you to narrow focus on problems or suggestions for change etc that have been flagged by users of the forum, and get specific feedback from trusted users.
The discussion of seldup (which is where the quote from Brian was posted) is a good example.
The original poster maintains that seldup sucks (which as it happens I also think it does).
There then follows discussion on what exactly is defined as a duplicate, both in strict code terms, and in real world terms.
Two circles at the same diameter and centre, but rotated slightly with respect to each other are not identical in “code” terms, but are identical in the “real” world.
So then, in my scenario, this dilemma would be posted to your contracted users, to each give real world feedback based on their experiences and needs.
So within a short timeframe, as well as the forum discussion, you’d have focussed feedback from your experts, and could move to implement changes to the tool or command that would be robust and considered, and likely to be the best solution to the problem.
The real users hang out here. Why do we need yet another group? We can tell who is real and who is just making up stuff because they don’t have anything else more fun to do.
One of the other problems is knowing importance of a requested enhancement. In the example, you bring up… it hard to figure out where it ranks among the other 3,000+ requests* for enhancements. A small group of users is not going to be able to tell us that.
*In other words, most everything in Rhino sucks. At least that is what the real end users are telling us.
Well, I was not suggesting you ignore all your users on these forums, rather that you’d likely get a more focussed and quality feedback on specific flagged items that might allow you to move forward more quickly…
But whatever…
And of course rhino sucks - everything sucks, just some things suck less, so we are after the least sucky…
You know with this private group that will presumably eventually have access to everything as it’s going on, they’ve done as close to what you’re asking for as you can expect. And you haven’t had anyone contact you directly to discuss any some particular issue you’ve had?
Anyway, feedback from “power users” is fine, but making us happy isn’t necessarily going to help sell more, we were presumably happy enough with Rhino as it was.
By being on our payroll, they’d have their feedback tied in some complicated to their compensation. If we set it up just wrong, we could pay people to tell us exactly what we wanted to hear, thereby making development considerably easier. We could get a product out to market faster, based on questionable “expert” feedback. And since we wouldn’t have bothered to include any of our paying customers in the process, we might not solve any of their problems, and end up with something that nobody wants to buy.
Look, this was just a suggestion, based on your remark that no-one at mcneel ever creates anything in rhino.
It seems to me that, if true, this a problem.
When Yamaha first started making motorcycles that were bigger than mopeds, the chief engineer was a very physically small person - ie he was too small to ride a large motorcycle. Their motorcycles were crap.
Compare with the team that made Ducati - they all rode motorcycles, were passionate about motorcycles, and they made (and still do) some of the best motorcycles in the world.
The only way you’d get real world feedback from anything was if you actually used the product in its intended discipline.
If you weren’t a motorcyclist, then you might be able to make a good machine, but you’d never make a great motorcycle.
If no one at mcneel “rides the motorcycle”, then how are you going to understand how the software “handles”, how well it takes corners, if it gives you that incredible feeling of oneness with the machine?
I’ve been on this forum and its predecessors since way back before V1 was released, and I’ve seen plenty of people come and go.
Many of the those, including the most vocal, did not appear to me to be those whose opinions and comments you’d necessarily want to base decisions about how to organise your software on.
It’s not to say these users are not providing useful, and sometimes brilliant and insightful feedback, but rather they were a somewhat random mix, and crucially only commented on things at random times.
Accordingly, I suggested that if you could somehow collect a group of professional users, who not only would give real world feedback, but were reliably available to help with whatever was needed, then it might be advantageous.
I wasn’t suggesting that users of the forums were ignored, or that your professional group would be the sole source of input.