Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Poser 8... First Impressions

ziggie opened this issue on Aug 04, 2009 · 617 posts


JHoagland posted Wed, 05 August 2009 at 1:41 PM

Quote - LOL. No they're not stupid. It's my fault. (I wrote the library GUI)

Well not exactly my fault, but Adobe's. See, this is written in Flex, and I'm using the Flex Tree widget. Just getting it to show custom thumbnails on a per-item basis was tricky. Getting it to support thumbnails at different sizes was even trickier, but I made it work.

Back to our story. Getting the control to display a child item count was tricky. Getting the tree control to cache the folder thumbnail was tricky. Getting it to open folders when you click the name, but not other parts was tricky. Lots of tricky.

First, I'd like to start by saying how much we appreciate the hard work bagginsbill has put into this. The new "flex" Library is a definite step in the right direction. And as a software designer myself, I can definitely appreciate the trickiness of some software problems: you fix one issue, only to have it cause other issues. ;)

But, the question I have is about usability: why was Poser 8 shipped with such tiny Library icons? Did Smith Micro have a "drop dead" ship date and they absolutely couldn't change the size of the icons? Was there really no way they could have at least increased the icons to 91x91, which everyone is used to, before shipping?
Or would this issue have taken weeks to fix and there was no way it could have been included in Poser to make it sell-able at Siggraph?

Okay, yes, this issue will probably be fixed in a service pack, but what happens in the meantime? Do people ask for refunds because they can't see the icons? Do people go back to using P6 or P7?
To me, issuing service packs is is the lazy way out, especially when Smith Micro never announced an official release date and didn't have to have P8 finished by that date. I've read too many stories about software that's shipped in a buggy state just to get it out for sale (Poser 5 anyone?) and then fixed with each additional service pack.

On a related note, it seems the keyboard shortcuts are broken yet again. I selected a pose, applied it to the figure, and hit Ctrl-R to render, but nothing happened. I hit "2" to select the figure's BODY, but the Library jumped to the first pose that started with "2".


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