Randall- I’m not quite sure why I get these over-the-top responses from you, but I too will respond with a longer post in order to defend my position that was so thoroughly attacked- regardless of your qualifiers to the contrary.
First of all, I never complained about Jonathan’s expertise or professionalism, so I have no idea where your remarks on that came from. Jonathan was extremely capable and a nice guy. I have no issues with him whatsoever, so I’m not sure why you would presume otherwise other than to make it look like I am being unreasonable in some way.
I simply indicated that Jonathan provided me with a workaround for the problem. It’s a workaround because the functionality that I was having problems with used to exist. So it is indeed a workaround.
I simply wanted to present the facts as I understand them, and dispel the notion that there is a big problem with Apex which forced Jonathan to re-install the software in a vain attempt to fix something and that you were left with only a work-around and essentially in "limp mode", barely able to get any work done.
The fact is, he DID have to completely reinstall the program and I WAS left with a work around. I think you’ve gotten to the point of trying to talk your way out of problems with your software rather than directing your programmers to actually fix some of these problems. And that’s why forums such as this exist- to allow appraisers to discuss these issues… and not necessarily for vendors to simply tell appraisers that they are the only ones experiencing such problems.
I used to be able to press CRTL-C and the sketch would center on the page. That command is used frequently while drawing in order to keep the entire sketch visible in the drawing area. Now, I have to use the scroll bar on the right side of the page to manually center the page in the monitor before hitting CTRL-C prior to saving the sketch, or else is comes into Total 2013 not being centered. That’s obviously a loss in functionality from the way it used to work, hence the term “workaround”, and it’s obviously related to the other display related issues. You might notice that others have had the same problem and have posted their concerns on this same forum back in August of last year, and they were using Clickforms. I should not have to manually use the scroll bar prior to hitting CTRL-C, nor did I have to do that in the past. It kind of makes the CTRL-C function useless if manual adjustments are necessary anyway. Centering a sketch is something that is done dozens of time while drawing a complex sketch, so this loss in functionality is a big deal.
There is a vertical line on the right side of my screen that indicates the edge of the drawing area. Jonathan told me that should be a dashed line and that there should be a gray colored background on both sides of the page to indicate the extent of the drawing area. Not only is there no gray color whatsoever, but the vertical line that indicates the page extent is only visible on the right side of my page. No matter how far I zoom out of the drawing window, I never see any page extent indicators other than the one on the right side of the page. Kind of makes it difficult to figure out if my sketch will fit onto the sketch page when brought back into Total 2013 if the visual indicators in Apex don’t make any sense.
Overall, there are some pretty significant problems with the functionality of how the sketch gets displayed on the screen and you really need a programmer who understands how to program for different display adapters as well as monitors. “Talking your way out” of a problem just doesn’t cut it with me.
The font issue is one that we’ve talked about before, and irrespective of your comments, really needs to be fixed. I know of no other program where zooming in and out of the displayed area on the monitor will actually change the font size. It makes it impossible to initially draw a sketch using the same size fonts unless you never zoom in or out. If I draw a 10 point font then I expect that font to remain “10” point regardless of whether I look at it from a closer distance, or not.
It becomes ridiculous to initially draw a sketch and have more than one font size used on the measurements. This problem is compounded by the fact that when I delete various measurements, they come back when using the CTRL-F10 function which allows for the measurements to be displayed either inside or outside the sketch itself. So the process of using Apex consists of drawing a sketch where the font sizes of the measurements usually end up being different from each other. So I end up selecting all of those and manually changing them to be the same size. Now they end up being too close or too far away from the exterior wall lines, so I manually move them around. I’ll oftentimes use CTRL-F10 to have all of the measurements on the outside of the exterior wall lines, BUT that function brings back any measurements that were previously deleted! That means that the delete function isn’t even deleting the measurements in the first place, but is hiding them only to be resurrected when invoking CTRL-F10. That’s a very basic programming error, or at least a poor decision of what good usability should be like.
These three characteristics of your program really make it a hassle to edit the measurements. I typically draw my sketch in order to have a gross living area calculation so that I can get on with working with my appraisal. I will then leave the final ‘editing’ until I’m nearly done with the appraisal because I know I’ll have to waste time with all of these limitations.
You can perseverate all you want about the reasons for these problems, but in my opinion, they are a result of very poor programming. And I can’t even imagine why there would be any remnants of DOS functionality in Apex.
I starting playing around with Alamode’s sketching program last night and it works perfectly. I haven’t had enough time to thoroughly test it out. It used to have a problem in that drawing overlapping areas would merge the two levels together. This made it impossible to draw one area over another like what would be required for a bi-level or tri-level style. I discussed this with their tech support last year and now it appears that the functionality works as it should. I did not hear anyone from Alamode tell me that it was my problem. I did have a few tech people spend time with me last year to understand what the issue was, and it GOT FIXED! I can’t imagine that they would allow a sketch program to continue to have the same problems. Their sketch simply centers on the page when I hit the “C” key and the drawing stays nicely centered on the actual sketch page in their software. Unless I’m mistaken, your company has been developing sketch software for a much longer period of time as compared to Alamode. They are quickly overtaking your product in terms of functionality because they don’t talk their way out of problems- they actually do something about them.
Insofar as the reason why appraisers use this forum, I’m sure that many want to be aware of what problems they might experience if they decide to buy a particular product and that has nothing to do with someone comparing plumage. It has everything to do with appraisers discussing issues that they are having with particular products.
It is simply an "aspect ratio" item when folks are running Apex on a "Landscape" monitor but working with a sketch Addenda page which is a "Portrait" aspect. Further, according to Jonathan, the "work-around" item revolves a long-standing discussion/debate between you and I on font scaling. The Av5 (or earlier?) product is what it is and will not be "fixed" in that regard. The reason is that the coding decision on why it works that way is much too deeply embedded and based on a decision I made back in the DOS days having to do with the need to support a print-to-scale feature. Future versions needed to support this so people could migrate files "back in the day." I completely understand your comments about "CAD doesn't work that way" as I own (and use!) CAD software on almost a daily basis - not just cheesy "house plans" crap but also professional programs running in the $10K range. Additionally, we author cad programs and utilities for various file conversion used by individuals, jurisdictional and Enterprise-level customers. I am very familiar with the issues involved and I am very sure that Apex v5 )or earlier) will not be changing in that regard. That said, I understand that neither you nor some others like this particular aspect of Apex v5 and earlier. Scaling in general works differently in Apex v6, and this includes fonts. Due to the completely different use case scenarios for an Apex sketcher, it will not work like most CAD programs, but it is different than earlier Apex releases and much more attuned to how most casual consumers expect things to work