The history button was not visible until I moused over something else adjacent to the history panel. My point is this: while programming for Windows computers, follow Windows conventions — don’t invent new ways of doing things and expect that users will immediately pick them up. Perhaps users who have more free time have more time to play with Shapr3D, but I have a brother with cancer who isn’t doing well and my GF’s brother was hospitalized with a head injury and internal bleeding necessitating exploratory surgery.
When I’m not busy with that, I work well over 100 hours per week, with virtually no free time. Thus I appreciate it when programs respect user time. In this case, the history button could be visible in the History panel (preferably with some visual show/hide indication), or it should give the option to hide it with a right mouse click or something other than not having the History button appear until I mouse over what looks like a clock face with the clock at nine p.m. Is that intuitive? Shapr3D doesn’t log TIME; it tracks STEPS, so there are better options for that icon.
If you think I seem exasperated with Shapr3D, let me briefly explain one of the major reasons why: almost every day I use it, it manages to waste hours of my time because its response is glacially slow, worse than any of the many programs I’ve used on countless computers since the 1980s. While Shapr3D will sometimes respond instantaneously, there is often (sometimes > 50% of the time) a second or two, frequently up to several seconds, until the program responds. This gets really annoying and confusing, with me often wondering if I should click again. If I don’t, usually nothing happens, as if the first (and often the second, third, etc.) mouse click never registered with Shapr3D. This trained me to click, wait a second or two, click again, wait, click again, then finally see the program respond, but sometimes with the clicks tripping up themselves. Frustrating.
By the way, my mouse works just fine with every other program. Attempting to understand how the program could be that slow, I often wonder if the processing is done locally or if computers merely act as dumb terminals with commands being transmitted to and from Europe. In the United States, as I am, that might explain the inordinate delays in responding to mouse clicks that don’t appear in other CAD programs. If that isn’t the explanation, there must be something causing such sluggishness.
Shapr3D has some nifty features and looks to have great future potential but it seems to suffer from insufficient receptiveness to user feedback.
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
— Bill Gates
