Seems that the ease of use and intuitiveness of panorama is slowly being taken away by upgrades. The ease of programing via pop up menus and pull down menus was not the way the programers thought we wanted to do things. Now with the new Panorama X you seem to have taken a large step in dumbing down the program again. I have tried for a few weeks now and decided I found nothing that has improved for my use. Functions that worked fine in 6 don’t exist or don’t work. I wish I had never bought the new version. I see this trend in other programs & applications. Programmers are not the same as users & don’t seem to grasp how people are using their products & what they like and what they don’t like. So that neat new feature might be a move in a direction that is not improvement for the user. Panorama 4 was much more useful and fun to use than the un-clear current procedures. Of course this is just my opinion.
Mine is that I’m finding that the toolbox has been greatly expanded. I’m in the process of building a new version of a complex database and am enjoying all the new capabilities that I can add to the old. Yes, here and there I find something I liked is gone but I’m finding plenty of new options and workarounds that lead to a better result.
Do keep in mind that Panorama X is still evolving - and rapidly. Many of the menus you refer to have been recently restored and I suspect more are coming. I’d be happy to see the menus with commands and functions restored to the contextual menu on procedures. That’s probably one of those you’re referring to.
Don’t give up though. Panorama X is very promising. Hang in there through the learning curve and I think you’ll find it to be worthwhile.
I would say there also has to be a level of frustration when you have ponied up to the bar with your $100, but when you get into it, you find there are a lot of bugs and stability problems. Why am I paying (the same amount as anyone who later buys the ‘release version’) to track down bugs and report them and correct the documentation? I think that’s a fair question, but technically, I am not. I have decided to let Panorama rest on my hard drive until I see some progress has been made.
I must admit that Panorama X takes some getting use to, but after some tweaks to my various Pan databases the results are worth it. I bought the $300 license because I believe in Jim and Panorama. I have been a Apple user since 1980 and my goto program for database is Panorama. I use it several times a day. Another thing, I am 72 years old and the fun of doing programing using “PanTalk” has sharpened my mind. The forum is great and you usually get an answer within a few hours. And many times it comes from Jim himself.
Panorama is a community of users who help each other, try getting that from Microsoft!! I have been using Pan X for about two weeks now and find the interface is great allowing me to make the data entry page look up-to-date. Sure, there are some things that need to be addressed but they are listening and working hard to address the concerns.
From a proud user of Panorama since the late 1980’s
Not complaining about change or improvement what I am commenting about is taking a clear easy to use feature and update/change/enhancing it until it is harder to use or absent. The time developing this code and its intuitiveness is being tossed away. Many features that were easy and fun to do are now a much more complex obscure function. Take the function an ask the user what “Improvements are Needed With scant documentation and little examples the new software is difficult to just rewrite so it does the same think as the previous data base. My change function, pop up menus, edit windows, Invisible buttons all have issues or don’t work at all. I will leave it all to the rest of you I am bailing out of being a user. I regard the $100 as a bought lesson. I think after using panorama since the 9” black & white Mac I do have a feel for the function & feel of the program. It has many nice features and improvements but in many ares it has been made much less functional & Intuitive.
Henceforth to many’s pleasure I am retiring my “Improved/updated/faster/new” version so I will refrain from further comments.
@Niles You may not have seen that I’ve recently written a long post discussing how and why Panorama has changed, and what’s going to happen in the future.
I hope that you will continue watching the progress of Panorama X and perhaps at some point jump back in. You’ve only used $8 of usage so far so you can always jump back in next month, next year, or whenever and pick up right where you left off.