Hi group! I'm just back from browsing the PanoToolsNG newsgroup, and if you've got some time to spare, look at the thread 'Newbie question - is PTGui the best?'
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/PanoToolsNG/message/44594 Now be warned, I'll have a good rant and vent a lot of frustration that has built up during a year or so of using hugin. The thread above starts with a 'newbie question': what is better, hugin or PTGui. Now I can't give an opinion on the issue since I'm a hugin user, but I am a bit saddened by the state of affairs. I'm a hugin user, and judging from the discussion in the other newsgroup, I can be one since I'm a competent computer user who can wrangle the thing into submission by doing all kinds of stuff an 'ordinary user' would be unable or unwilling to do. I am a competent computer user, in fact I am ex-pro and have been programming the things for the past 25 years or so, on and off. So I've seen a lot of software in that time, and what I want to say now is not just some vain complaint. Hard as it may seem one has to meet the users where they are and give them something that works from where they can start and maybe proceed to more complex things. Now if I look at my experience with hugin where nothing ever seems to work 'out of the box' and the first thing one has to do once one's found something at all to install is to edit command lines and install third party software, I can sympathise with users being frustrated and not bothering any more. I have been using hugin for a good year now, but, for example, after installing 2010.2.0 into a clean state (apart from some remaining settings I could find no way to get rid of) it took me half a day or so to get the CPGs I usually use to run properly again - I deliberately tried to start from scratch to assess the difficulties and test the new installer. One cannot recommend something like that to a 'newbie' whith a clean conscience. And I'd much rather spend a day working with the software than trying to work around it's inadequacies. Currently I am making an attempt to see if I can help make things better by looking at the code and maybe contribute something or find the odd bug. My first step was to compile libpano, you may have seen my posts. In the process of compiling libpano, I had to build a fair few other libraries as well. they were friendly.easy. They told me what to do, and when I did it, the library would build itself and install. wxwidgets took something like four hours to compile and install on my system, and all I had to do was ./configure, make, make install. I really appreciate all the development work taking place for the good cause of making hugin a better program, but does it have to be so hostile to the casual from-source approach? I mean, it's fine if it uses cmake, but I don't want to have to learn cmake just to get it to compile on my system. I feel any work on new features is wasted, if a new user fails to get it to run at all because the out-of-the-box configuration does just not work. And, yes, I'm using it on Windows. And so are a lot of other people, I reckon. Not because I like that OS, but because you get more software running on Windows than on any other platform (correct me if I'm wrong). When I read the (probably outdated) tutorial on how to compile libpano12 on windows, I saw minGW +msys being used, and thought, great, gcc, g++, all free, open source, good thing. I once installed MSVC, and since the sources coming with libpano13 looked MSVCish, I fired it up to try. So it tells me I must register (like, now) to use the product. Well, I don't want to register and so I don't use the product. minGW certainly doesn't pester me or anyone else, it just expects me to put a bit of brains and time into getting it installed and working. >From whatever angle I approach hugin, it's an uphill struggle. And I really want to like it and use it and recommend it, because I'm all for free software, and because I know there is a really good program inside hugin that is struggling to come out! Okay, so now I've had my good rant. I apologize if I have been injust; I don't mean to offend anyone, but I felt I just had to vent my frustration - I wonder if there's going to be any echo? with regards KFJ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Hugin and other free panoramic software" group. A list of frequently asked questions is available at: http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx
