Friday, October 7, 2016

I saw a pocket watch

That pretty much sums up the current direction of Fusion360.

Fusion is a great ap, and the new pricing schedule is actually affordable. But it does have it's peccadilloes. Chief among them being that it is being revised and revamped so frequently there are no current manuals or online help sources or other instructions that actually apply to the real program (they all reference buttons, functions, or entire modes of employ that got taken out several program versions ago).

This updating is, also, forced. On at least three occasions I've had a deadline -- I had to finish a model and I only had a few hours to do so -- but Fusion360 (unlike every other, intelligent, application) makes updates mandatory. Stop work and wait for their extremely slow server (two hours wait to download the latest update, not infrequently). No, you can't work in the background. No, you can't put it off. No, you can't even "fool" it by turning off wifi -- because Fusion360 is so damned cloud-minded all of your data files become inaccessible when you go offline. No matter where you try to force their storage.

So the latest update pushed through (along with the ominous warning that the next update will require an OS update, forcing me to use an OS with known and serious flaws), and it took even longer to start working. The side panel where all of my files are accessed stayed blank for a frighteningly long time, and when I hovered the mouse over it.......

....I got a watch face.

Anyone who knows anything about the Mac OS flees in terror at this point. You should NEVER be that deep into legacy cruft where you see the watch face. It basically means some programmer screwed up bad.

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