A second order shouldn’t be necessary, so we obviously have room to improve here
The cases that we’ve encountered have indeed been failing due to edge cases that were simply unaccounted for in design. Frequency or volume of an incident does not establish a “common” problem, per se. We have a lot of fragmentation due to changes in service providers for our store, website, and hosting, and it’s just not as simple as “give everyone the thing”. There are a ton of things happening to ensure as many customers as possible had a smooth update. It’s going to keep improving with each update.
There have been a handful of releases that did make it to public, in an effort to address widespread server connection issues, and they could have been handled better. I’ll give you that. It’s very difficult to test so many builds in a short amount of time, and our reaction to the problems that are reported to us are in direct relation to the severity of the issue. If we released more than one build in a day, then we fixed something pretty substantial, to justify the double-release. Most people will just see a .2 version update, instead of updating both .1 version updates, but that doesn’t really address the release frequency.
I’d love to have you join the ongoing beta tests for Studio
You don’t necessarily have to request to join. If you want to participate, I’ll go ahead and add you to the group.
We’re working towards a more sane SCRUM schedule pattern, but this early stage has required a lot of changes. For reasons I’m not really able to discuss, we had to move one of our large feature updates up in the schedule, which kind of threw a wrench in our planned release schedule. We don’t anticipate a disruption big enough to make our schedule change like that, in the future, so this schedule will slow down, going forward.
Pretty much every assertion you’ve made here is spot on. We have a lot of room to improve, and are nowhere near done. It’s been an exciting year, that’s for sure.
Agile is the way many companies are going today. We use it to maximize the benefit to employees and customers by giving them new or improved functionality in a shorter time. With things moving at an ever faster pace you will be left in the dust if you release software once every year. As a certified scrum master I can attest to the benefits first hand. One of the keys I believe is transparency with your customers. Moving from a big bang release to short development cycles takes some getting use to. As they mature and become intimate with the process it will soon be the accepted norm. Testing is key and that is why this group’s dedication is so important. We are lucky where I work in that we control the PCs that our employees use. We give them a good sized SSD and plenty of RAM along with controlling the video card and memory. We test on a handful of PCs and know it will work throughout the company.
Joe, thanks for the invitation for joining beta tester group. You see, I have my own problems working in the software development field. I have not used Studio very much but if time permits, I certainly would like to help testing. As you and others already mentioned, having a controlled Scrum process will definitely help.
Twelve years ago I was working in software development for auto-pagination in the academic publishing industry. We had no acroymns then like SCRUM or Agile, but we had something called Common Sense.
It’s good to see that Topaz has not abandoned common sense and is taking a holistic approach to its development. Call it what you will, but as long as you are recognising and addressing problems progressively and do not rely too heavily on structured approach there will still be room for innovation.
It’s good, too, that you involve your customer base so completely. Keep up the good work.
I had a stint in software development too going back even further and we didn’t have an acronym either so I got a kick out of your reply. It was more like “It needs…it’s missing…can we?..” I guess you could call it “Common Sense” too.
Hi, I very much like new Impression in Studio. Great presets and better brushstrokes. However, it is soooo slow. Even using a small size image, I’m scrolling down in presets and after several presets it starts slowing down and stops responding completely. I’m using stand alone version on PC. Cleaned up heavy files on PC to free up memory, still the same “doesn’t respond”… So irritating. Anyone had this issue? Any suggestions to improve? Thanks. Yuri
Thanks Don. Yeh, looks like I need to make RAM upgrade. I have 4G RAM which is at minimum level. Video card is Intel HD 5500 which should be OK, although it has only 1.7G available graphic memory. And one processor i5-5200. Yuri
In your screenshot, in the Adjustments menu, Impression is showing up as black, but in the panel on the left, both Clarity and Impression show up in the Specialty section. What happens when you try to open Impression from the Specialty section?
I have the opposite problem: for me, Impression is blue in the Adjustments menu (clicking on it doesn’t open the Impression interface, it only opens a panel on the right where I can select different strokes, etc), but the Specialty section on the left is completely empty. Opening Impression from the Plugins menu opens the old Impression interface.
EDIT: I just noticed that your problem has been fixed. It was odd though, that my symptoms are opposite. I guess I will have to submit a ticket.
I have ticket #126340. After reading all the threads, sounds like I may have the database issue also. I’ve gone thru all the steps, confirmed I have Impression, installed the latest Studio version, have validated my plugins, but Impression does not show up in the left panel.
I submitted my request on 9/19, received a reply with clarifying questions on 9/25 and responded that day. Have not heard back yet. Now over a week with no resolution, or feedback as to a possible resolution and time frame. Any suggestions?
msfinman, you are not the only one that has that problem. I’ve had conversations with 2 techs and find them not responsive. Owning every product Topaz has makes it very frustrating. At the present I have Studio saying I need to ‘go Pro’…Topaz has yet to reply to my latest communication attempt a week ago. At this time, without notification from Topaz I’m starting to believe they would like to forget the problem.
I had a stint in software development too going back even further and we didn’t have an acronym either so I got a kick out of your reply. It was more like “It needs…it’s missing…can we?..” I guess you could call it “Common Sense” too.