Hi DM33,
I totally agree with your statements, except, of course, for your "arrogant, ignorant, and ungrateful" ... and I don't understand why you're talking about "Insult" here.
For the arrogant part I'm sorry not to be always "politically correct" but, beside the fact that my english vocabulary is poor (which can explain a part of it) when I state that VSL is the worth _PLUGIN_ experience (not product) I never have, I'm sorry but that's unfortunately true, I mean it, and I appreciate that VSL people are not considering arrogant the fact that I give us my time and feedback.
But maybe I have to explain this a bit more - as the topic of this thread is not clear:
- First I'm talking about the "loading" experience of VSL plugin at the launch of a logic audio pro and or the loading of logic audio pro project.
- Then just Let's compare with a plugin like Toontrack DFH superior (quite a similar product, I mean I use it to load the same amount of sample data as VSL, around 1GB inside a track) : when it loads the samples the plugin doesn't override all OS windows focus (one thing I've never seen among OSX applications, it looks like a very dirty hack in my eyes). I don't need to open one window first to go to the main plugin window... it seems - quote from the vsl online video - that this is just mac specific ... what does it mean ?
- Now let's compare to logic 7.x or Maya (usb key protected software) : they don't take between 10 and 20 seconds to check their licenses.
And I'm pretty unhappy with all that. Because I'm sure this can be avoided ...
DFH, or Maya has other kind of issues, my Line6 Gearbox plugin too, and because I love those products... I've told them.
For the Ignorant part : I'm actually ignorant, but aren't we all... in a way ? In the other hand I'm a very pragmatic user and have a pretty serious experience of all kind of media production software. And, another thing, concerning user experience and its design, my experience is that ignorance is bless on that very specific matter.
One other thing, I know for sure, is that most developers have that inclination that consist to hide some kind of laziness behind statements like "Behave correctly, as expected" or "That's the kind of thing user should not do" (i.e: write a mail while a software is loading... ) where everybody else on earth will see a bug. Why not just say ..."yeah I know that, it's not easy ...etc" instead ?
... as for the Ungrateful, you're totally wrong. I'm amazed by VSL work (quality and amount of samples, player performances, the usability, versatility and beauty of the vienna instrument software is really stunning). But, don't you think that "tickling somebody where it hurts" (french expression) is not always for doing harm ? (There's a beautiful "little bird" metaphor about it in "My name is nobody" movie, for the connoisseur. This metaphor is my credo).
So I've been a bit harsh, have I ?
Maybe, maybe not...
(by the way : I'm happy to learn that we're talking of a small developer team here, as I know for sure that small teams do the best products on earth. Give me some times, and, as I promise I will contact people here and there and try to convince them to be more understanding).