*irony off*
(Such software with so many complex settings really deserves better documentation.)
This is a very, very important point.
We're lucky that we do have a these forums, and Alexey, etc, helping out in most posts... But the documentation is OK in most areas, and 'lacking' in many.
This is a complex application doing so many different things, with lots and lots of features, that help us in so many ways... But so little is written about some of them.
We're also blessed with an astoundingly easy workflow that works so, so well out of the box, so we can get epic results with almost no effort or experience with the software... But the devil is in the details... When things don't quite work as hoped, when we need to go the extra miles to get the very accurate results demanded by the job at hand, then we have to get dirty and get technical, using all the little special features that do very specific things... Part of it is knowing how to use them... bit a big part of it is knowing that they exist in the first place!!!
As with any complex software like this, if you have good documentation, and a good user community, then the software can be very easy to use and get the job done, meaning that it'll get adopted by more and more of the industries that need it.
The easiest to use, most well documented, most supported software will win over the complex unsupported ones, even if they're match in ability.
Some things that would make Metashape better:
- Tooltips: Tooltips are amazing! And familiar to us all. MS uses them already for the toolbar buttons, but it could use them a LOT MORE? Tooltips be added to every setting in the preferences dialogs (which is a common place for them) defining the setting and suggesting values.
Could they also be added for all the menu items? Not just the toolbar buttons? Not that common, but still very, very desirable.
The tool tips should be an explanation of the feature, and if possible, with perhaps a few notes on applications, suggested values, etc.
As tooltips appear after a delay, even a long explanation, or lots of details about it, would not affect the usage, experience by the user, it won't get in the way. If you pause, you get a good explanation. If you know what you're doing, they proably don't get enough time to appear.
Flesh these tooltips out, and enable them everywhere! - Example scenarios: In the manual, it would be great if a lot of the features had examples of where it could be used, and how it would be used for different uses of MS... So there would be examples for aerial/drone work, examples for turntable rigs, for interiors, etc, etc. where the settings might be different for the different uses.
- Crowd-sourced explanations and examples: Perhaps the users that have gained a lot of experience with MS could submit their settings and insight about various features, say as concise case studies.
It could even be that each time Alexey fleshes out an explanation of a feature for us, after a forum user posts, then we could take that explanation and submit it in a 'Tooltip' format and a revised Manual entry. The documentation would then grow as a when features are asked about and explained. - Workflows: One of the most useful, educational, and even reassuring documents, is the USGS Processing Workflow. Probably one of the most valuable resources to a lot of us. It tells us what, when and why, to get the outputs they needed.
If we could get a collection of these, submitted by us users, for all of our different use cases, then that would be absolutely amazing, so useful.
Each workflow could then be critiqued by us peers and the devs, and then perhaps updated as we learn new things, new features come along. The author optimises their workflow, we all learn from their workflow.
Having a few different workflows for your type of use case would be great. Some for drone surveys, some for underwater surveys, some for scanning archaeological sites, or museum specimens on turntables, scanning cars, etc, etc, etc...
This would allow any new user to get up to a reasonable speed, very, very quickly!
Fleshing out good quality documentation, manuals, etc is not easy, it's very time consuming, and needs maintaining... The devs are busy enough coding new features and making MS faster... But it's very, very important... If it can be improved, it absolutely will help us all... And the easier to use software will ultimately sell more copies.
Topic: Added Erosion radius option to Classify Ground Points dialog (Read 9416 times)
