Also, as far as upgrading the OS, the longer they wait and the more features that they add, the more that they are going to have to change.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Alex Hall Sent: Monday, August 03, 2009 12:36 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [Braillenote] RE: BrailleNote frustrations 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 ___ Replies to this message will go directly to the sender. If your reply would be useful to the list, please send a copy to the list as well. To leave the BrailleNote list, send a blank message to [email protected] To view the list archives or change your preferences, visit http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote ___ Replies to this message will go directly to the sender. If your reply would be useful to the list, please send a copy to the list as well. To leave the BrailleNote list, send a blank message to [email protected] To view the list archives or change your preferences, visit http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote
