Joel said:
I'm always amazed at how many "easy to fix" bugs remain in products year after
year... just stupid stuff, like the ORCAD capture line width rendering bug I
mentioned. It's not like the GUI portion of the tool is rocket science...
This is one of the reasons I switched to Cadsoft. They run several
newsgroups (real ones, accessible via this here newsreader...).
Employees of that company actually come online for help, take
suggestions and they even run separate suggestion NGs in at least two
languages. And they do listen. Best of all, after we all sent in our
electronic "Dear Santa" letters quite a few of the suggestions have
either already made it into new releases or are now on the roadmap for
the next release. Such as my pet peeve, lack of additional part fields
that I am missing so much from my OrCad days. They announced that it's a
good idea and that they'll do that. Now that's customer service. Ok,
sometimes wishes are declined, such as mine for hierarchical sheet
structures. A rather serious shortcoming IMHO but they are of different
opinion. Oh well, nothing is perfect.
Also, this SW is quite open. There is fully documented user language
programming and scripting. So if you need something unorthodox to happen
you can write a kolstad.ulp routine and it'll do that. Many times all it
takes is a look at their download area. Chance are someone else needed
the same thing and has shared a ULP routine.