I sent a message to hw and wanted to share the response from
them. You can read through my list of frustrations and add your
own; send any to [email protected], as Greg says below. Read
through his response to get my original message.
Have a great day,
Alex
---- Original Message ------
From: "HumanWare Technical Support" <[email protected]
Subject: RE: BrailleNote frustrations
Date sent: Mon, 3 Aug 2009 12:28:51 -0400
Hello Alex
Let me first start by saying that we appreciate your extremely
well done
compiled synopsis of the listers frustrations. As we monitor the
list
we have developed a list of our own, but this is of great help as
your
list was quite organized and to the point.
Having said that, because I do not have the answers to all your
questions, I have sent this list to both the product manager and
research and development for observation and response. I
completely
understand your frustrations, and I can assure you that even
though we
do not directly respond to listers's frustrations, please know
that we
are monitoring the list, and are aware of the different issues
people
are having. In return, I know that you can understand that in
business
today, we cannot always give details of upcoming features,
products or
issues, and we appreciate the patience and understanding of the
users
because of this fact.
At Humanware, the Braille note has always been our most widely
known,
and popular product. This has occured because of its simplicity
of use,
and because we listen to our users. Please know that we are
hearing
your frustrations. We appreciate your feed back, especially when
it is
posted in this type of format, and we are always looking to make
the
product better. The most effective way we can continue to
improve the
product to the satisfaction of our users is to continue to hear
your
constructive criticism and suggestions.
We developed the list to allow users to help each other, and as
we have
said several times in the past, if you have suggestions or
specific
issues that you would like heard, or assistance with, please
send them
to [email protected]. This gives us the most direct contact
with
our users and allows us to assist in the most efficient way
possible.
Once again Alex, thank you for the well written list of
frustrations and
we appreciate your feedback.
Regards
Greg Stilson
Humanware Product And Support Specialist
www.humanware.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Alex Hall [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, August 02, 2009 5:16 PM
To: us.info; HumanWare Technical Support
Subject: BrailleNote frustrations
Hello,
I am sending this to both tech support and the general info
addresses in hopes that someone will be able to respond to all of
the below concerns with straight answers. If anyone at Humanware
is monitoring the Braillenote discussion list, you will no doubt
recognize many of these. I repeat them here since they have not
been answered to the satisfaction of most active members on that
list.
1. Why will KeyChat, a feature years in the making, not connect
to any of the most common instant messenger networks, namely
Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, and AIM?
2. Why is it that the BrailleNote, advertised primarily as a
device to "empower customers", still has so many wordprocessor
problems? I do not refer only to the lack of Microsoft Word
support, but also the erasing of data after format markers (in
braille shown as dollar sign f), the erasing of some RTF files,
leaving no text except an English language indicator, the lack of
support for complex formatting such as tables or images, the
complete inability to use any of the "rich formatting features"
(line spacing, fonts, indents, and so on which are not kept when
moving, translating, or printing a document, so what good are
they?) All of these are very well-known issues, yet they have
never been addressed, though in all fairness I have to say that
the RTF problem seems to have come about as of ks7.5.x.
3. Why no Windows CE upgrade? There are so many advantages to
this: PDF support, bluetooth audio and file transfers,
multi-tasking... In case you had not noticed, the bn is the one
notetaker running a version ofCE that was new six years ago; the
rest have CE5.x, not 4.2. I have heard the reason about it being
a lot of work, but if HW felt it important enough, I would think
they would be on it, not just putting it off over and over and
blaming its unexistence on too much work. That seems like a
rather flimsy excuse, considering that the dev team is there to
work on ks, not to say that a project is too hard, so they will
not do it.
4. Has any thought been given to the problem of file sharing
over networks? This was a big selling point for ks6, but with
Windows Vista and the upcoming Windows 7, it means NOTHING! The
bn can no longer connect to a shared folder on these operating
systems, so browsing networks now helps me not at all. The above
mention of bluetooth object exchange would at least partially
help in this area, but that is also not happening.
5. What about keymail? No message filters for blocking senders'
addresses or domains, no rules for sorting messages, no
conversation grouping, no incorperation of RSS, and I still have
that little problem of my bn adding random characters to the end
of email addresses when I send messages. I still have to
manually free database space, I still cannot open media files or
web pages from keymail's attachment manager, there is no way to
sort messages into folders depending on which account I used to
download them, my signature is added multiple times if I switch
out of and then back into a message I am writing, and, thanks to
this new Ambicom wl54G card, I still get errors for no reason and
have to either reset or wait five minutes before trying again,
and it will then usually connect, not to mention the long waits
to disconnect from my pop server. All this, and I still cannot
even save an email somewhere else. Sure I can store the text,
but what about when I want to forward the message or reply to it?
What if I want to look at the headers... Wait, Keymail does not
let me examine email headers! Do not even get me started on html
emails or clicking links in email messages...
6. Keyweb... A great program back in ks6.x, but now slow and
not able to support increasingly common html tags. If I am on a
site with any dhtml (where the text changes without reloading the
page) I am out of luck. If I want to click an object that is not
a link or input control, such as in Google Calendar, I cannot do
so. If a webpage counts my characters as I type to ensure I do
not go over a limit or does something as I scroll through a
listbox (both using the Javascript onChange event) then I am left
out. Can I stream audio? Yes, sort of. If a file is too big,
and I am still not sure how this is determined, then I cannot do
so, even if I have plenty of room on my flash disk. If I want to
spellcheck something I just wrote in a text box, I can do so, but
replacing misspelled words is up to me; the bn will not do it
automatically like it does in the wordprocessor. Finally,
dialogs that ask for input are poorly supported; they are
useable, but not very. Why can these not be translated into
keysoft-like menus instead?
6. The media player has always been pretty good, and playlists
are nice. However, it will still not save your place in a file,
will not let you jump by seconds instead of percentages, and you
can still not play songs in a random order. There is much more I
could say, but it would be my own wants, not features that I feel
are important to the bn.
7. The calculator is one of the best I have seen; scientific,
fractions, and stats all make it very useful. However, there is
still no unit converter, base converter, DMS function, or a way
of editing a calculation with a cursor.
8. Keybook workswell, thoughI still cannot set my default code
to UEB for brf files, and DAISY hardly works at all. It is slow,
and my position is never saved.
9. On the subject of user surveys: how are these performed? I
have never heard of any being conducted, yet I have heard of two
after the fact that have impacted me. One was about an SDK (the
ability to write programs for the bn family using software
provided by HW). Apparently, users were asked why they wanted an
SDK, and most said that it would be for games, so no SDK was
made. The second was about the forced switch to Eloquence inside
keybook; I hate Eloquence on the bn since it sounds like every
few words are an entire sentence (imagine how choppy that makes
things sound), it is set at a different rate, and it is much
slower to respond in general than KNG. Regarding the SDK, I
would love to have one of these so that I could make some of the
changes mentioned above, and games are not a bad thing; think
about how the bn would seem if it were the only one to offer
basic card games, just like Windows, right out of the box, not to
mention all the other apps users could make. As far as the
second survey, I think it isobvious that I do not like Eloquence
on the bn, and would not like to have to read my books with it
instead of KNG. These surveys should be publicized; sent to the
bn list, announced on the bnannounce list, posted on the hw
website, and so on. What good is a user survey if users do not
know about it????
Thank you for your time. For all of my above comments, I still
love my bnmp, but it just keeps falling further behind. TheBook
Sense can read Word2007 files, which seems to indicate that
theBraille/Voice Sense notetakers will not be far behind; they
can already talk to MSN, move items over bluetooth, and I will
not even go into the hardware upgrades that the bn would have to
undergo to even catch up. I think the main point with many on
the bn list is that hw seems very unresponsive; we keep sending
suggestions and bug reports, and we mostly get either silence or
a generic "thank you; this has been sent to the development
team." Great, but for something that was sent to the dev team
years ago, these features sure are a long time in coming! More
detail would help since it would not only tell us what is really
going on with the features we have been asking for for years, it
would also make it seem that HW is actually interested in their
customers, which is not the case at the moment. As I said in the
beginning of this message: some straight answers, even if it is
"we have scrapped such and such an idea" would be immensely
appreciated. Thanks again for reading.
Have a great day,
Alex, sn42074
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