eCabinet Systems, Part 1
Wondering where I’ve been lately? Well, eCabinet Systems’ software finally arrived, and I’ve been spending every spare minute working on it. Well, every spare minute that wasn’t spent working on a finger jointing jig, but that’s for another post. In any case, here’s my notes on it so far. These are, of course, just my observations after using the software for less than a week.
* It really is free; there appear to be no strings attached whatsoever.
* Installation is easy.
* I couldn’t register the software for three days because their server was offline, but it just hung instead of telling me that. Other poorly-thought-out-error-conditions abound. I suspect Thermwood needs to hire some good dedicated testers.
* It crashes periodically (bad), but doesn’t appear to corrupt the files when it goes down (good).
* Pricing of stuff you buy through the system seems OK, but I can find better prices in most cases elsewhere.
* It is still buggy; for example, if you have a cabinet without a face frame, you can’t add doors without jumping through some hoops (like adding and then removing a face frame).
* It’s moderately difficult to use. The UI is a combination of windows-standard and what I believe is AutoCAD-compatible. There are some pretty silly UI choices all over the place, like using buttons when they should be using tabs, and giving things similar-but-slightly-different names. All that being said, it’s not completely crazy and is quite learnable.
* The “manual” aka learning guide is invaluable; working through it is time consuming (>350 pages) but very helpful. I’d estimate it’ll take me ~10 hours to get through it at a leisurely pace, including lots of playing around.
* I’m psyched about designing some quick and dirty bookcases to try this out further.
Expect more sporadic postings as I ramp up on this.
(yeah, I do software design in my other life–my last job was as a lead program manager for the Windows XP user interface at Microsoft–but I tried to keep the UI critique to a minimum.)
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