I share a lot of Gary's frustrations, although I haven't expressed it as eloquently :-). I also appreciate Alexandra's and Scott's opinions. I am not opposed to the OWL interface, per se, having used it in InDesign, etc. It is the general lack of quality control and consistency that has been disappointing for me. FM 9 was really a dog as far as performance and stability and the interface changed the way important short cuts worked in previous versions. FrameMaker 11 had an undocumented FDK change that caused problems with document display updates in plugins and scripts. Documentation updates have lagged behind in each release. The ExtendScript documentation is sparse and contains inaccurate information. At the same time, users have had to pay premium dollars for each release while Adobe struggles to "get it right".
For me, FrameMaker 8 was a solid version. It had unicode support and the "old", simple interface made things fast and efficient for automation. Scripts typically run slower in the newer versions and you have to ignore long periods of a white, "Not Responding" screen. InDesign is not perfect for long documents, but the quality and "fit and finish" of the entire InDesign universe is a stark contrast to the FrameMaker world. Rick Quatro Carmen Publishing Inc. 585-366-4017 r...@frameexpert.com From: framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Zimmerman, Gary Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2014 7:08 PM To: framers@lists.frameusers.com Subject: RE: making stuff unconditional in FM12 I swear it's like the Adobe FrameMaker developers do absolutely NO usability testing, get absolutely NO feedback from existing customers, focus groups, or anything else before they foist on us a crappy, untested GUI that their offshore developers implemented in some kind of cultural vacuum. (Not offshore culture so much as programmer culture - before any programmers get offended, there are plenty of exceptional programmers who have a GREAT sense of usability and customer needs - apparently Adobe hasn't hired any for the FM team, nor any usability/human factors consultants.) The programming underneath may be great (I doubt it, with the general fragility of the thing for many releases now), but the usability if off-the-charts bad. Like something designed by a bunch of college programmers who have no concept of building a usable product, but instead think "more is better" so they toss in everything figuring that they'll have something for everyone, and end up with such a hash salad that you spend more time jumping through GUI hoops than you do productive writing. (Remember what college kids did when word processors introduce lots of fun fonts to play with - the FM 9 and 10 GUI is pretty much the GUI equivalent of "ransom letter" tech writing.) I can remember when FM was unquestionably a better choice than Word for any serious documentation work. Now they're approaching parity. I don't know about FM8, but when we jumped from 7 to 9, it was all downhill after that. We're on 10 now, debating upgrading. We're also moving to a DITA CMS and Xmetal editor - much less powerful, but it does what it needs to do without being an obstacle to the writers. We didn't even consider using FM as our XML editor, though the transition might have been less of an issue for our writers who are used to FM. Sorry to rant. I LIKE FM. I'm just so sorry they messed with the GUI and messed up so badly with 9 and onwards. They may fix it to be decent again incrementally, but like Windows 8, they should have scrapped the whole thing when they realized what a horrible blunder they made instead of turning a deaf ear and insisting everything was great for so long, when real users knew it wasn't so. Credibility gone. Maybe 11 is better, maybe 12 even better. Don't know if I'll ever get to try them. -- garyZ
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