We can certainly understand the frustration and I can assure you we’re working as hard as we can to get the details surrounding the release of V5 finalized. As a quick update, I'd like to let you know that earlier this month we performed a lengthy series of updates to our larger backend systems in preparation for the release. So while the pandemic may have slowed us down there has certainly been some significant progress now that things are stabilizing.
zemlin wrote: ↑Mon Jul 27, 2020 10:58 pm
I'm also in the product development/innovation field, so I know how easy it is for things to snowball....
Having the worldwide COVID pandemic occur right in the middle of our largest product development effort yet was certainly tough to anticipate. It admittedly slowed us down, but we’re proud of our decision to support the community's effort to give back during a time of crisis and confident the release of V5 is going to be Simplify3D's greatest yet.
gwhite wrote:
....
If the company has been busy helping with the pandemic, all they would had to do is announce that back in March or April, and I think a lot of the complaints that have been posted in the last 4 months would have evaporated.
....
We’ve been posting information about our COVID work on our blog (
https://www.simplify3d.com/blog/) and social channels since early April, but I can certainly appreciate that it would have been helpful to post more of those updates here on the forum. We're adding more official Simplify3D employees to help provide more responses to our power users on our forum going forward.
billyd wrote:
You must have a build of the new version. Release it as beta and let us help with the debug.
We’ve already performed several rounds of testing internally. In accordance with Simplify3D's development standards we like to make sure things are pretty robust before we do any external testing.
dkightley wrote:
....
Rather than giving your existing customers the same old same old news, why can't you give some form of real progress report on v5?? Surely there are some key points that can be released to whet our appetites. An indication of how the new version will differ from the current software; what any new features will be, and some real indication of when the release will be.
....
While we aren’t ready to share the exact features list yet, what I can tell you is that the company does a great job reviewing and compiling the feature suggestions from this forum. That played a huge role in the features that were selected for the release, so I’m confident many of the features will be familiar to our users.
As always, we value and appreciate our users' honest feedback. It’s been a significant guiding hand in the direction we’ve taken the product and the features we're working on adding.
"A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song."