Just a heads up that, with the official release of 2.4.3 completed, we will be going through the user request backlog here in the next few days. If you’d like to request something or lend your support to an existing request (please try not to duplicate requests), please feel free.
(if it’s not in here we won’t review it…)
A quick note about requests… if we decide not to implement your request, please do not take offense to it. It doesn’t mean that we don’t like your idea or that it was bad… we decide not to implement a lot of things because we strive to keep SGPro usable (and we don’t see a good way to do it), or your request, while good, may fall outside the scope of what we are trying to achieve… reliable, automated capture of data and finally, we must consider the support implications of every feature. If we implement a feature that is complex (to the user) then we must expect to allocate a certain percentage of our time helping people understand how to use it. For every feature like this, it siphons time away from other feature development. You can see that, over time, the number of support requests might dominate the time we can spend with SGPro.
With respect to support, we currently spend about 50% of the time we can dedicate to SGPro on auto focus, meridian flips and plate solving related failures. There are only so many more of these types of features we can implement and still provide you with the support you deserve.
Anyhow… enough of this. I just want to make sure, as we go through this process, nobody’s feelings are hurt. AP is a complex hobby and just about everyone participating in it is smarter than the average bear.
I have gone through the feature requests list and categorized almost all of them (except for a few of them that need some more thinking).
I am very excited that we have such an active and engaged user base… thank you all for your thoughts and ideas.
What is not done yet is going through the “Accepted Unplanned” list to see if any of those items are in a state where we can have more visibility on their implementation time frame.
A few trends I noticed:
More than a few requests didn’t quite make the cut because they were oriented around consideration of gaps created by bad / odd hardware or software combinations. We don’t want SGPro to turn into a super complex piece of software so that it can account for all configuration short-comings for all users. The requests for change are certainly understandable… something is not working for you and you want it to.
Some requests were “low hanging fruit”. As such, if they made the cut, were probably added to the 2.4 life cycle. We don’t want to continue to delay the implementation of important 2.5 features so we were pretty careful here… if the request was low risk and would take less than a couple hours to implement and test, we moved them in front of 2.5. I think the total count was 3…
There are still lots of duplicate requests that do the original request no favors by splitting the focus on it. I think I was able to find and combine most of them, but I’ll never be certain. We politely request that you take a look through existing feature requests before making a new one (we will try to keep this list a little more lean in the future… we got behind on this cycle).