seperate feedback/feature request forum needed
like this:
http://feedback.cocoatech.com/forums/27 ... nder-ideas
we can make requests, flesh out ideas and other users can vote on them. support issues go here in the current forum and feature requests go there. as it is now the proper way to make a feature request is to make a support case - so other users have no way of knowing what other users are suggesting. more votes/replies should help tell Phase One what features are important and might help drive development in the right direction.
http://feedback.cocoatech.com/forums/27 ... nder-ideas
we can make requests, flesh out ideas and other users can vote on them. support issues go here in the current forum and feature requests go there. as it is now the proper way to make a feature request is to make a support case - so other users have no way of knowing what other users are suggesting. more votes/replies should help tell Phase One what features are important and might help drive development in the right direction.
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Edward,
I have no idea how Phase see this but having at times sat on 'the other side of the fence' it was my experience that users (admittedly corporates but there are similar principles to consider) would often either oppose a suggestion (in a 'live' interactive user group for example) if it did not fit their agenda or go along with every suggestion made whether they were interested in it or not. A "features free for all" could get very messy and provided the development team leaders with a very distorted picture of what was of real benefit to people.
I guess one advantage of photo editing softeare is that at least the client is also the end user rather than some intermediate manager who has no clue about the really useful aspects of the system.
Great idea to have a suggestions area - not sure if they work better blind or public.
There may be a case for running blind on suggestion but then publishing a top xx most requested and allowing users to state preferences for the order of development. Or something like that.
The danger is that your thoroughbred race horse develops into a committee designed camel whilst the entire world watches the evolution.
Meanwhile the majority of respondents provide no new ideas. They just want things the way they are now using whatever their current 'favoured' software might be. May as well do a licence deal with Adobe and re-brand their products since those will be the most familiar to the majority.
Hmm. That should draw some fire.
Phasers set to stun, come on people tell me you are full of truly new "must have" ideas!
Grant Perkins0 -
Grant-
For most pro users - C1P does not need major new groundbreaking features.
We want little improvements that make our job everyday easier. I started this thread b/c I responded to someone today who asked to have a checkbox in the process panel to process w/o crop like there is to process w/o sharpening. The only way to do that is to create a support case that no one else sees. And I know that feature has been requested in the past somewhere in these forums but its been buried. There is so much garbage in these forums that it is really hard to separate useful requests from genuine support questions from whining. Having a feature request list would help tremendously. Adobe has one too:
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop ... yle=topics
regarding the "committee designed camel" i would say its there already with some of the latest features - but by having a way to better voice our needs (as pro digi techs, retouchers, photographers) we can keep polishing the essential parts.0 -
Edward,
I would not wish to disagree with you and in many ways I don't .... but .... I suspect that gaining an effective and usable concensus may slightly more challenging than herding cats.
Now from what I see on the blog, on YouTube and with some of the posters in the forum, there does seem to be a cross section of very active professionals already involved with P1. Presumably there is feedback from that group and I don't doubt that suggestions and 'advice' come from other directions too. These are people who use a broad range of products - cameras and software - on a regular basis as do you. There may well be a case for extending that sphere of influence in an expending market and that should be readily managable. I'm yet to be convinced that 'crowdsourcing' ideas is so effective nor that it can be effectively managed. I would be happy to be proved wrong.
On the other hand I think a widely representative group of trusted and experienced people may have much to offer and a directly vested interest in making it all relevant even if only to boost their reputations!
My guess is that you and a handful of your peers doing similar work can indeed identify good and very useful ways to polish the experience but the rest of us (likely the majority) are probably not even vaguely aware of the issues you face. On a popular vote you would, I suspect, get nowhere with your suggestions. Privately you are more likely to succeed. But I'm guessing (though based on many years of observations in similar situations.)
Grant Perkins0 -
I have not been invited as a beta tester even though I use C1P in the pro fashion realm so I and others I work with have no input. a feature request forum would help then. we are not interested in adding new features to compete with Lightroom just to make this software better for digital capture pros and retouchers. I see alot of features added like adjustment masks that are more flexibly handled in Photoshop, in my opinion not needed but I guess the majority (not capture techs and retouchers) want that stuff. 0 -
Exactly the point I was trying make really.
The challenge, from a provider's point of view, is make available something that covers a lot of variable needs that often overlap but for some quite distinct groups never really get close at all.
It would be possible to develop unique and specifically tailored versions (hmm, maybe ...) for each major interest area but there will always be those who would be sitting on the borderlines. And to have separate versions is not usually very efficient use of resources ... and that means the costs go up.
Now in former times the costs to the Pro studios and so on may not have been so much of a concern and to buy Pro only products would be natural. In fact there pere probably no options. But that seems to have changed in recent times and so the developers cannot assume that a high cost Pro RAW converter would gain enough Pro Studio attention to make it viable. So costs need to be shared ... which really means consolidating the separate developments that one might have undertaken for different Pro requirements and then adding in some stuff to try and attract further revenues from the non-Pro part of the market. (All the while hoping that the rise of popularity of the ubiquitous "camera in a phone" market does not so skew people's perception of what a half decent photograph is that any old rubbish will gain mass approval.)
The big differences between the final finishing maket (especially for fashion of course) and the rest are likely to be money and the need to graphically manipulate images before the fashion industry will deem them usable. This as we all know way beyond cropping, elvelsna dncurves and a bit of colour tweaking that a Landscape artist might limit themselves to.
As I recall Adobe (and some of the other long term Graphics Manipulation packages) came in the market as graphics application and added photos as a valid medium from which to obtain a graphic - usually via a scan from analogue film. They identified an opportunity to dig deeper into the world of photography as the digital revolution evolved.
Many of the RAW convertors and photography initiated editors started out with little or no Graphical Manipulation content but in order to keep the products moving forward and generating revenues and growth they have had to offer more features and so become more complex .... and so it all rolls.
But we know all of this ...
On a personal level I have never got on with levels. PS, Elements or other similar products it matters not, levels and me just don;t seem to gel.
I bought LightRoom at V1 and liked that up to a point - not so fond of the catalogues. At around the same time I discovered another application - even back then rather like C1 is today - with which I felt much more at one. So I used that for a few years until it got stuck in a huge 'new technology re-write' hole and eventually disappeared from the commercial marketplace. C1 looked to cover nearly all the same ground and has a very similar look and feel and technical concept for files and handling (at least on Windows, can't speak about Macs.) Hopefully it will catch up with the missing bits one day! On the other hand the "under the hood" based results "right out of the box" looked special and continue to do so. For most images I can get a little more with less effort - which is good when a day can produce several thousand shots in variable (outdoor) light conditions.
As for the graphics stuff - I rarely need it (IMO!) so a "one application does nearly everything" approach is my preferred option. Preferably one that does not require layers that look like layers! I expect I am in a minority but i know I am not alone in that.
I really would not want the job of chairing the design committee trying to decide on the order of importance vs. deliverability for a product like C1 at the moment. I thiknk I wold have to rely on a hope that some of the most requested desirables may not yet be technically feasible - that makes it easier to shuffle them back to the next meeting. 😉
As it happens, completely separately and unexpectedly, I stumbled across a publically available 'wish list' on the site of a business use oriented social media centric web based application developer. Think information sharing and effective 'connected' working and all of those good things.
The deal was that they had presented a list of the top 20 or 30 'most requested' features and were asking people to cast votes to establish the popularity and importance of each of them with the implied promise that they would take notice of the resulting input. (Actually I suspect that the 'committee' had given up try to decide how to drive the product and decided to take a version break and let the masses design the camel.)
To my understanding during a quick read through they seemed to be getting all of the usual 'must have this because "such and such a product has it and I use it all the time' inputs that I suspected might be the usual case. It seemed very predictable and rather depressing.
I must make it clear that I am not saying I think the consultation exrecises (any form of them, public or not) have no value. But they do demand some allocation of resource and careful management. Ultimately an amalgamation of suggestions, revised and refined by a development team that has a will to make progress but a good view of what is possible and practical right now, is a good way to progress.
The teams I was involved with back some years ago produced more useful facilities for the broad range of users by listening to requirements, interpreting them, amalgamating them with other requirements and adding their own ideas.
For every new feature or function the team developed and released that had direct customer input large we could work out, after a suitable period, whether they were ever going to be used ; would be partly used; would be used but not as originally expected by the requesting client; or, with a few other levels between, found almost universal use and benefit from the majority of the clients.
We estimated that, as per industry expcetations at the time, about 80% of customer initiated features that were developed for a specific request by a specific client were never ever used even by the requesting client - they may have tested that it worked but that was about it. Another 10 or 15 % were used in some way but perhaps not as originally envisage although sometimes clients other than the one ho had requested the dvelopment found ways to make good use of it.
The 5 to 10 percent of successful introduction, broadly used in one way or another by the majority of the customers, were almost always internal ideas or adaptations and amalgamations of several ideas that had been gathered from various sources - and would have been unlikely to attract approving votes in their finally released form because no one client would have understood the need to accept that their 'simple' request would be included with something that looked far more complicated than they thought was really necessary.
So what does that ramble mean?
Well, the first challenge to make a crowd sourced 'feature development list' work is to find a way to manage it successfully without needing an army of people working with it. Which means, usually, managing expectations. That probably means spending more time working out the psychology necessary than it does understanding the descriptions, assessing the broader benefits and working out the technical options.
If it was my project I would be very reluctant to start anything without a pretty good understanding of the pschology required for such an approach. Just my opinion of course - others may welcome the challenges and see them as critical to the creative mission.
Sorry for the length of the post. Must have a look to see if anyone has written a doctoral thesis on the subject.
My few cents, for what they are worth.
Grant Perkins0
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