By way of background, I am one of those customers who moved to Ion from an Express 125. I expect there are, or will be, a lot of us making this leap over the next few years. I like the Ion, and I really like what it is going to make it possible for my community theatre to do as our lighting inventory catches up.
I have been looking through threads on this forum for months now, reading manuals, and poking at keys but continue to discouver many features, behaviours, and the like that are undocumented, or documented in some manuals for other consoles, that are unreferenced except in places like this forum. I found myself having to look at the Eos, Obsession, and other vendor manuals to learn enough about some features to be able to use them. In many cases I am at a loss to appreciate why certain features exist, or why there seems to be so many ways of accomplishing what appears to be the same task, or even why one would need to accomplish that task.
My peeve is with the overloaded keys. I recognize there is finite real estate on the console and it makes sense ergonomically to minimize keystrokes and finger motion, but how is somebody like me supposed to figure out, from available documentation, that pressing a key repeatedly, or holding it down and pressing another key in combination, depending on a particular mode, is going to yield a different result.
I started what I thought would be a straightforward task of pulling together a spreadsheet that attempts to map all the console keys to their actions but find it daunting. By the time I finish wading through a Strand manual to learn about a feature implement in Obsession that was translated to Eos and redefined for the limits of Ion, my head hurts.
Does anybody else see value in asking ETC to provide a matrix of all the keys, and their behaviours when pressed once, twice, multiple times, held in combination with other keys, and mapped across the Ion/Eos/Client family?
