Wish list - Beginner mode(s)

i honestly don't think it makes anything easier to switch off e.g. PixelMap. you don't need it then don't open the respective tab. there is not even a hardkey combination you can type by mistake that would open it...

I couldn't agree less.  

I have read the article, and comments on Facebook and linkedln.  It is written from a very small vision of the lighting world.  I am a firm believer that ETC has done a good job with the Eos family of consoles in keeping the system simple enough to step up to and operate, yet having a robust enough feature set to keep professionals happy programming them.  

If you don't need a feature don't use it.

ETC strives to make the defaults of the Eos family the best setting for the most users.  Every single show is different.  

If the console is constricted to a specific set of features in a particular mode there will be many shows that need a couple features that are in the next feature set and thus have to turn the console up one level.  They are then subjected to a completely different environment than what they have been working in.

Just my opinion,

 

I honestly think it's a terrible idea to limit feature sets. If you don't want to have a beginner break things, setup a magic sheet for your less experienced programmers, and have them click the buttons you pre-build.

I just waste an hour of my life reading that article and all the comment on LinkedIn, it is full of contradictions by someone that needs to spend less time watching Netflix's on his computer and more time learning how some of the feature in the Eos family could drag him into the current way we work.

Maybe he'd read this on his phone while driving, a classic from his comments.

Some form of a Beginner Mode is already available on Element, which is the entry-level option for this product line. User-level access controls will cover most of the rest of these requests, I recon... at least as they apply to a professional, modern lighting console like the Eos. I don't think that user-selectable feature sets are practical from a software development perspective. All of the features of the Eos product line are interconnected in some way. I can only imagine the edge-cases you could get your console into if you started disabling them one by one.

I will grant that there are venues in the world that have an Ion but would have been better served by Element (and the opposite as well). That's a marketing and sales problem. That's an education and training problem. That's not a problem with the products themselves.

I won't comment on the rest of that blog post except to say:  To argue that the Eos product line suffers from some sort of feature-bloat, while simultaneously arguing that it should be able to edit google docs and post to Facebook is patently absurd. To argue that students or other entry-level users would be better served by having less access to the features we use at the highest professional levels is contradictory, at best.