QLC+ 5.0.0 Beta2 release

[Yestalgia]

I'm on discord too!

And where might that be?

There's a very unofficial discord which is mostly for instant chat, video calls and banter. I direct all help requests to here.

[Pino]

Dear Massimo. First of all, a big compliment and a big thank you for the work you have done so far. I have now tried several times to get to grips with QLC+ 5 but unfortunately without success. I agree with the previous speaker that without a manual it is a blind flight. I constantly click on the right mouse button to find hints, but to no avail. I couldn't even manage to delete a fixture that had already been created. So it looks like I'm completely unsuitable as a pre-tester.
I am confident that I will try again sometime, but until then I will have to stick to tried and tested solutions.

best regards

Pino

[giacomo]

here some old videos that will explain most of the UI features:
viewtopic.php?t=8787
viewtopic.php?t=10682
viewtopic.php?t=11866

[ciacnorris]

Hello Massimo. First of all, I want to thank you again for your work. I've been using QLC+ professionally for many years now and I see it has set a standard in our industry, for many good reasons.

I have tried playing with 5's alphas and betas a few times and, like other people reported above, I couldn't get anything done in a reasonable amount of time. Tonight I tried again, I wanted to build a VC to control a few moving heads, but I got stuck trying to position them properly in the 3D view. I'm very tired and I'm surely missing something, I think we could at least say the UI is not idiot-friendly.

Now: you could say that no DMX console is user-friendly, you have to RTFM before using it or you won't go anywhere, and you would not be wrong. But one of the reasons of 4's success is its smooth learning curve and its interface intuitiveness for every pc user.

So maybe now the biggest bug of 5 is in its UI / UX. I think the new design concept is great, because it tends to expose to the user all of the actions or parameters that can be performed or set in any point of the workflow. But maybe some things could be exposed better, or maybe every icon could have its text below it (as a global option), and a lot of things like these. The more you make your mental model of how 5 works obvious via hints in the UI structure, the easier it gets. I know it's a very time-consuming job, but also looking at how a few new and old (4) users try to use 5 for the first time without any instruction could help a lot.

Another interesting point is that I have always dreamt of being able of doing everything in QLC+ 4 without having to touch the mouse. When you have to do a lot of work, using only the keyboard makes you 10x faster. This new interface, designed to expose everything to a single left-click, can lend itself very well to a quite 1-to-1 correspondence between icons and keyboard shortcuts. You press - for example - Alt, and all of the available shortcuts show up on the corresponding icon.
This could be a killer feature for all of the people that go on programming and controlling lights from a computer.

[OldDave]

I'm an old-time event, club & theatre lighting tech, wow new to QLC.

I found QLCPlus a couple of months ago and have been playing with both v4 and v5 in parallel.

I just wanted to say that to a newbie, I find v5 much more intuitive and easy to pickup. QLC v4 has some really powerful features, and v5 enhances those thorough the new UI and good touch screen support.

I'll be using QLC for a (small) upcoming event (8 fixtures, 1800 ws2812b leds) - and I just need to decide whether to use v4 or v5! (Acknowledging the startup disclaimer about v5 not being ready for production use. It seems pretty usable to me!)

Thanks for all the work, and I look forward to future v5 releases!