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Subject: 
Re: Frustration with NXT-G 1.1
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Mon, 25 May 2009 10:23:57 GMT
Original-From: 
gil11 <gil.alsberg@gmail.[StopSpam]com>
Viewed: 
13657 times
  
Doug,
I share your frustration very much. as a child and a teenager i was a Lego
Technic freak. In the last year i wanted to go back to my "roots" of
enjoyment, and decided to buy the mindstorms NXT kit as a starter, because
it seemed to me a cool robotics kit and the idea of GUI flowchart programing
appealed to me (i'm kind of a visual-graphical guy who prefer symbols over
text. in my work as a CAD modeller i work with SolidWorks which uses heavily
graphic symbols, GUI and etc..) and because i was certain that a well known
and established firm like Lego would not supply a buggy and messy software
with it.
- boy was i mistaken!!!

NXT-G 1.1 is one of the most buggiest software i've stumbled upon in the
recent years: moving a block which has data wires connected to it, wont move
the data wire ends with it. sometimes putting a legitimate block in a
legitimate sequance beam position will create an unjustified error. somtimes
moving or changing one block in a loop will cause the loop to partialy close
on it, and hiding important and functional blocks, which will render from
now on to uneditable.

it's GUI is also not so super by design: no zoom in/out on the program,
dragging a block out of viewport but inside the program is very slow and
quircky, to switch from pan to select it is necessery to select a button
above viewport instead of using the wo mouse keys..............i can
continue on and on with the quircks and disadvantages.

Those bugs are in the software for a long time, and have been reported to
Lego, but Lego didn't release any updates or hotfixes to those people who
are stucked with the 1.1 version. from my opinion this not how a well known
and respected firm should act!! something in their buissness code is very
wrong.

I wish there was a way to submit a petition to Lego by all its frustrated
customers.

thanks,
Gil ALsberg
P.O. Box 40029
Mevasseret Zion 90805
Israel


Doug Wilcox wrote:

It's been a LONG time since I've posted.

I was thrilled when my wife presented me with an NXT for our anniversary,
and have really enjoyed its capabilities. We migrated our MindStorms@Work
group to use the NXT, and dug into NXT-G (since we already knew NQC).

At first glance, it appeared that the NXT-G was wonderful ... much more
flexible and useful than the original Lego GUI, while still being
relatively easy to use. My primary interest was in determining whether it
would be easier to teach my kids NXT-G or NXC.

However, after repeatedly wrestling with "quirks" in NXT-G, I am ready to
throw in the towel. For example, see this image
http://www.wilcoxfamily.net/csort0511bd.jpg and the following description:

The gumball-sorter program on which my co-worker and I are working uses a
switch statement with five possibilities. The switch statement is within a
loop, which should exit if a counter monitoring "empty" attempts hits 5.
Regardless of what I do, I can never get the extreme right side of the
switch block to display, and can never get the data wire between the
counter evaluator block and the loop condition to connect in a way that
seems to do the right thing.

Add to this nuisances like "dead" wires being left onscreen, very weird
things happened when cutting and pasting, problems with selection
highlighting, etc., and you can see why I begin to wonder whether the
software is _really_ that bad or if I am going crazy.

What experiences have you all had?

(RCX version of of the candy sorter is BLOGged here:
http://mindstormsatwork.blogspot.com/ , while pictures of both RCX and NXT
versions - very different designs - are here:
http://picasaweb.google.com/MindStormsAtWork .)

Thanks.

--Doug Wilcox

WordSmith Digital Document Services
329 Nowell Street
Nashua, NH 03060-4453

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603-886-5225 home phone
http://www.wordsmithdigital.com
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--
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Frustration-with-NXT-G-1.1-tp17210944p23704707.html
Sent from the LEGO Robotics mailing list archive at Nabble.com.



Message is in Reply To:
  Frustration with NXT-G 1.1
 
It's been a LONG time since I've posted. I was thrilled when my wife presented me with an NXT for our anniversary, and have really enjoyed its capabilities. We migrated our MindStorms@Work group to use the NXT, and dug into NXT-G (since we already (...) (16 years ago, 13-May-08, to lugnet.robotics)

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