Guide and Service Tool 12.0.6

[dlewis]

I'm not thrilled with the new GUI in the latest revision of Guide and Service tool.  I find the new font hard to read and it seems very fuzzy until you zoom in.  Also, the tool bar is now grey scale rather than color.  This makes it difficult to find the function I'm looking to use.  It all seems like a BIG step backwards.

[acmall]

I agree this is a massive step backwards.

The lack of colour in the icons makes distinguishing between them much harder and also increases eye strain as you now have to look for the one you want whereas when they were colour your eye is quickly drawn to the one you wanted by colour recognition.

I think it is the new text anti-aliasing feature that is making the text in the graphics area blurred when zoomed out , especially with the dark theme. In v11 even small text was crisp and easy to read when zoomed out. Now when zoomed out the text is burred and either difficult or impossible to read resulting in needing to zoom in.

The colours in the graphics area have also been changed and are now more muted which reduces contrast and again increases eye strain. This is also going be even harder to see when working outdoors in the daylight, which is fairly common when working on mobile equipment.

I really hope that whoever makes these decisions will give us the option to return to colour icons and if the anti-aliasing of the text in the graphics area cannot be better implemented so that the text is not blurred when zoomed out then give us the option to turn it off. I personally am much more interested in functionality over the interface looking pretty or meeting some perceived idea of 'modern'. I also do not want to end the my day with a headache due to the increased eye strain that this change is going to cause.

I think the most annoying thing about this is that there has obviously been a lot of hard work and effort went into making the changes, that hard work and effort could have went into improving functionality instead of redesigning something that didn’t really need changed and then ending up with a worse user experience.

The attached image show a comparison between the old and new graphics area.

[dlewis]

AMEN !!!

[gregbosma]

I haven't had much time to look into GUIDE yet, but I just took a look at Service Tool 12.0.6 and there's one big flaw...

Looks like BOOL elements on ServiceTool's graphical overviews are no longer colored red or green... this will be a huge problem. I have several .p1d files written where the BOOL elements help immediately identify a fault by showing a bit of red in a sea of green icons, but now we need to try noticing the word "OFF" in a sea of the word "ON". Also, just this week I had to video chat with one of our field techs. As shown in the attached screenshot, it's pretty easy to see the red or green icons from a blurry phone screen. Imagine trying to read from that phone screen without red/green fill colors...

I imagine Danfoss did the graphical update to accommodate colorblindness... If this is the case, there are other options I'd suggest:

• Configurable setting for turning on/off "colorblind mode"
• Instead of red/green fill, use black/white fill for BOOL icons (fill black w/ white text for "ON", fill white with black text for "OFF")

Overall, I can get used to the black-and-white toolbar icons, but taking away the BOOL icon's red/green fill colors is unacceptable.
 

[FStelzer]

... and again - no multiline support for comments 

[tkane]

bring the colors back to the icons, please

[FluidPowerTom]

... and again - no multiline support for comments 

This fact alone is just obnoxious.  It seems to me that multiline comment support would be a no-brainer as well. 

I haven't yet fully evaluated the new version, but at a glance it's fairly clean.  Eliminating the color from ON/OFF on the Service Tool seems like an odd choice, and I'm guessing they did it for the connotations that 'OFF' isn't always bad while 'red' is broadly considered as a negative indicator.  I'll also echo the displeasure at removing the color from the component icon drop downs.

In the past I've seen the main highlights on new versions posted here in the forum.  Has anyone found where we can view the update notes or new features?  As always I'd like to see more features within the Structured Text interface.

edit:  I see the Release Notes are available in the Help drop down within GUIDE.

[G30RG3]

bring the colors back to the icons, please

50 shades of Grey is:
- Not a great book
- Not a great movie
- Not the way to get customers happy, Danfoss!

Going all shades of black and grey, and offset this by making the size of the icons a bit larger and scale-able doesn't make me happy.
On a large screen it's OK, but with my old-ish eyes and the current sizes of laptop screens, all these icons look identical now...

All in all, it seems Danfoss made the same decisions as Microsoft did when they redesigned Office. MS-Office received mixed response at best...

[SJ Industries]

Just got back into it after Christmas and I have to agree with all the above comments, for a fairly new user to this platform it has made use less enjoyable. I find the text really difficult to focus on. The text in the menu bars etc is smaller and I can read it fine but the work area is a nightmare.
Multiline text would be great, and the ability to assign functions to mouse keys ie swap the function of RHS mouse button and the scroll wheel function press function. (I actually like it how it is but my 3D cad program wont swap theirs and it is painful going from program to program)

[oiltronic]

I'm going to jump on the band wagon because I like wagon rides, even if I don't agree with everything being said by those on the wagon:

• I really like the dark theme.  Well done!  Only missed bit is the startup page, which is still a light theme.
• I agree that grey icons are much less distinct than colored ones.  And I'm moderately red-green color blind.  Things like the bus & wire port icons were nice to have as visually distinct, because those were pretty much the only ones I used in the toolbar.  Most other functions are accessed with shortcut hotkeys.  I'm guessing I'll get used to it and muscle memory will bring me to the correct icon quicker than my eyes ...
• ...but I don't like how the icons next to all components in the Selector window are all gray.  The colors here were very useful, I think, to quickly select the desired component category.
• Whatever font is used in the graphical editor looks great when large, so-so with a fuzzy edge when medium, and quite bad when very small.  It's pretty but that's not why I use GUIDE.  I couldn't find an option to select a different font which is also disappointing.  The old CAD font used in GUIDE version <=11 was legible at small sizes but pretty ugly, which only bothered my uncle the artist.
• STILL no text box for resizable multi-line comments?  Seriously?  I can see that GUIDE's ancient-CAD-style command-click paradigm is not really compatible with objects that can be dragged and resized, but surely a new page-like object could be made for this purpose, with an optionally visible border, that could be resized similarly to entering the page interface editor.
• When do we get to eliminate or resize the page bounding box?

[SJ Industries]

As I have written in another thread, I can not get certain display programs to compile in this version but will compile in the previous version. Is there any feedback you would require to fix this issue?

[FluidPowerTom]

• When do we get to eliminate or resize the page bounding box?

Agreed with Oiltronic's views - especially this one.  In most of my subroutines I end up outright ignoring the arbitrary bounding box.  To date I've never had a customer who insisted on the program being printed out.

[acmall]

So I thought I would give this another go now that it is a new year to see if my initial reaction was just me getting older and starting to have issues with change!


I don't want to come across as all negative, as oiltronic I also like the dark theme just not the all grey icons but, as soon as I opened one of my existing programs and navigated to a page with a lot of blurry text, that is perfectly readable at the same zoom level in previous versions, I concluded that my initial assessment hasn't changed. As is it now I will probably continue with V11.1 which is a pity as there are some good improvements but they are getting overshadowed by the changes to the UI which for me has resulted in a worse user experience.

Also agree with the statements about multiline comments.


I played with it a bit and have found a couple of other issues: -
 
Guide

• When using Auto Pop-Ups on the component tab I cannot select any component that is in the first level of the Auto Pop-Up. For example, when hovering over Logical and clicking NOT the NOT component is not selected.  Going more than one level deep into the Auto Pop-Ups works fine. For example, when hovering over Logical then hovering over AND then clicking AND2 it is selected as expected.
• When any of the constant components contain a single digit the text is squashed to half the width.

Service Tool CAN Monitor

• When using fixed position display of the CAN Messages the CAN message text is constantly flickering. This does not happen in previous versions.
  While we are on the subject of the CAN Monitor, it would be nice to have the option to increase the font size.

Is any one else seeing these issues?

[Nilla]

Hi all!

Thank you very much for all your feedback, it is greatly appreciated! We've forwarded all of the information to our software development team for review.

As I have written in another thread, I can not get certain display programs to compile in this version but will compile in the previous version. Is there any feedback you would require to fix this issue?

I've posted a response to you in the other thread.

So I thought I would give this another go now that it is a new year to see if my initial reaction was just me getting older and starting to have issues with change!


I don't want to come across as all negative, as oiltronic I also like the dark theme just not the all grey icons but, as soon as I opened one of my existing programs and navigated to a page with a lot of blurry text, that is perfectly readable at the same zoom level in previous versions, I concluded that my initial assessment hasn't changed. As is it now I will probably continue with V11.1 which is a pity as there are some good improvements but they are getting overshadowed by the changes to the UI which for me has resulted in a worse user experience.

Also agree with the statements about multiline comments.


I played with it a bit and have found a couple of other issues: -
 
Guide

• When using Auto Pop-Ups on the component tab I cannot select any component that is in the first level of the Auto Pop-Up. For example, when hovering over Logical and clicking NOT the NOT component is not selected.  Going more than one level deep into the Auto Pop-Ups works fine. For example, when hovering over Logical then hovering over AND then clicking AND2 it is selected as expected.
• When any of the constant components contain a single digit the text is squashed to half the width.

Service Tool CAN Monitor

• When using fixed position display of the CAN Messages the CAN message text is constantly flickering. This does not happen in previous versions.
  While we are on the subject of the CAN Monitor, it would be nice to have the option to increase the font size.

Is any one else seeing these issues?

GUIDE
1. We know about this issue with auto pop-up, we have a solution for it and it will most probably be in the next patch.
2. We know about this issue with single digits looking squashed but no solution in place yet.
SERVICE TOOL CAN MONITOR
We know about this issue with flickering but no solution in place yet.
I will add the request for possibility to increase font size to our wish list.

Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions or feedback on v12.0.6 of the tools!

Best regards
Nilla
PLUS+1 Helpdesk team

[SJ Industries]

Hi Nilla, as posted in the other thread, I got it to work, I didn't have the latest hardware file for the display.