Ive never developed but can it be that hard?

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kimothebeatmaker
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31 Oct 2019

Some of the feature requests i've seen be ignored by Propellerhead...don't seem that hard to implement...

This is my ignorance talking, but how hard is it to implement things like customizable hotkeys? I see "Additional Overrides" and if they could just add the rest of the commands to that, it would be lovely.

Or HiDpi Scaling? Is it not just re-imaging the GUI image files and replacing them with hi resolution vectors? Am I over simplifying this?

I think at the very minimum, Reason 11 should have supported hi resolution monitors, working in low res mode is painful...but maybe im just a wuss lol. Ok no maybe, I AM a wuss.

iMacs for the most part come with 4k these days, and Macbooks are all in hi res retina screens...
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Loque
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01 Nov 2019

Uh... Yes, you never coded... Simple things can be hard, indeed. And there is not only coding, there is testing, marketing, documenting,...

I participated in a few beta RE and it sometimes took months to iron out the last bugs, write the manual and so on... And it was just the beta phase.
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kimothebeatmaker
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01 Nov 2019

I didn't think it would be easy per say, but complicated to the point where they ignore user requests for years and multiple versions? Especially for engineers who are familiar with the code, assuming they do have inhouse engineers and don't outsource their work everytime they update?
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orthodox
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01 Nov 2019

I think, that would slow it down significantly. Besides, it would blow the size of the Reason app. If I were them, I would wait another 5-10 years for the hardware to keep up and for the standards to settle. Now at least it works pretty fast.

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kimothebeatmaker
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01 Nov 2019

Im not sure if you're being sarcastic. I think you're being sarcastic. Are you being sarcastic?
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orthodox
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01 Nov 2019

kimothebeatmaker wrote:
01 Nov 2019
Im not sure if you're being sarcastic. I think you're being sarcastic. Are you being sarcastic?
No I am being damn serious. Apart from you people asking for modern hi-res monitor support, there's still a lot of users running Reason on old hardware. Which I have the honor to represent.

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xboix
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01 Nov 2019

It just comes down to money. The bug list and wish list is always bigger than the resources available to address them. If you take on more developers you have to sell more products to pay for them.

Custom keyboard shortcuts are a fairly easy thing to implement but not doing it will probably not lose you any sales.

The display resolution thing is a huge task but will eventually lead to fewer sales if they don't address it. I think they will at least be working on this in the background.

But, yeah, money is everything.

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kimothebeatmaker
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01 Nov 2019

orthodox wrote:
01 Nov 2019
kimothebeatmaker wrote:
01 Nov 2019
Im not sure if you're being sarcastic. I think you're being sarcastic. Are you being sarcastic?
No I am being damn serious. Apart from you people asking for modern hi-res monitor support, there's still a lot of users running Reason on old hardware. Which I have the honor to represent.
When you say 5-10 years for hardware to catch up...you mean the hardware we have today isn't able to achieve hi-res images? Im sorry, your comment is confusing me, which is why I thought it was sarcasm.

When you say it works pretty fast, are you in low resolution mode? I admit, it does work 'decent' in low resolution mode, but it's very blurry on a 4k monitor.
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kimothebeatmaker
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01 Nov 2019

xboix wrote:
01 Nov 2019
It just comes down to money. The bug list and wish list is always bigger than the resources available to address them. If you take on more developers you have to sell more products to pay for them.

Custom keyboard shortcuts are a fairly easy thing to implement but not doing it will probably not lose you any sales.

The display resolution thing is a huge task but will eventually lead to fewer sales if they don't address it. I think they will at least be working on this in the background.

But, yeah, money is everything.
The bug list / wish list has been about the same for a few major versions...they just took on new investors, and each of the version upgrades....not to assume that they are striking gold, but id imagine they are making enough to atleast cover the cost for their developers...they've managed to pay developers to turn r11 into a plugin, couldn't that money have been used to turn r11 into something users actually asked for? I mean...they've barely addressed any of the feature requests i've seen around forums / reddit / facebook groups / youtube videos....
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guitfnky
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01 Nov 2019

loque is right. seemingly simple things can be really difficult when it comes to coding.

but so what? they’ve known about many of these feature requests for a VERY LONG TIME now (as the OP rightly states). at this point, it’s impossible to argue that we don’t have many of these features because the coding is tough to do. the only reason we don’t have them is because Props/Reason Studios hasn’t made them a priority.

they like to innovate—that’s great! but they focus on innovation at the expense of bringing the core experience up to modern (okay, often historical) standards, and that’s bad.

it’s not surprising that many users are grumbling and worried about where their favorite DAW is headed.

I take solace knowing that at the very least, RS devs are aware of those concerns (Mattias acknowledged his understanding, and responded directly on the topic here in the forums). I only hope those concerns are taken to heart, and addressed—sooner, rather than later.
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Periwinkle
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01 Nov 2019

Working as a frontend web designer/developer (some time ago) I thought it might be easy to transitions into backend coding like PHP, or maybe C+ for game development.

It wasn't

That's two years of my life that I'm never getting back lol.
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dioxide
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01 Nov 2019

Historically PH used to like to innovate, but their competitors always took those ideas anyway within a version or two. At least now PH have been focusing on playing catch up a bit. It's well overdue but I'm happy it's happening.

As someone here said it comes down to money. It's been frustrating to watch projects like Allihoopa and PH's half hearted experiments in iOS apps when you know that this money could be better spend on the core offerings.

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Oquasec
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01 Nov 2019

Cubase has done all of this wayyyyyyyyyyy before reason did.
But propellerhead's ecosystem is more than enough to make up for that.
That is not even close to being simple.
You need years of experience to code those , reason is C++ and lua scripting.
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orthodox
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01 Nov 2019

kimothebeatmaker wrote:
01 Nov 2019
you mean the hardware we have today isn't able to achieve hi-res images?
It is. I'm just worrying it would affect performance and RAM requirements. The problem with Reason is that it's not Ableton where the entire UI consists of bars and circles that you can easily scale up. There are rack device panel images, which are now precompiled to low resolution. If they were hi-res, that would take more RAM and more time to draw. Besides, every RE would need to be RE-visited, RE-compiled and RE-attested. I'm sure that's going to lead to a LOT of problems.
kimothebeatmaker wrote:
01 Nov 2019
When you say it works pretty fast, are you in low resolution mode? I admit, it does work 'decent' in low resolution mode, but it's very blurry on a 4k monitor.
I don't have resolution modes. All I have is 3 full hd (1920x1080) monitors, 23"-27", that is 90-105 dpi.

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Oquasec
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01 Nov 2019

You know what is missing that too?...Reaktor.
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Tweak
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01 Nov 2019

Thinking about why seemingly simple features don't get added:

Coding an application fresh is one thing, adding functionality to an existing decade old code base, is something somewhat different. As applications grow in size, they require their code base maintained, either to keep old features compatible with new ones, or simply to keep the overall technology in touch with current day. End users typically don't benefit from these types of changes tangibly, but these changes can be significant in terms of development cost and time. The bigger your application becomes, the more of this type of maintenance is required.

Further to this, sometimes changes for new features to support compatibility with legacy code are so costly development-wise that the only feasible approach is to start from the ground up. I can imagine whole areas of Reason's code base could be sitting in this position. If Reason Studios were in the middle of large scale redevelopment of the application, it would be unpalatable to add features to the current version, as they'd almost certainly need to write the code a second time to add the same feature to their ground-up rewrite. Why spent months writing HiDPI support into an application if you are rewriting the application behind the scenes and will need to do this again? Not saying this is what is happening, but is a plausible explanation for what looks like a lack of progress from the outside

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sch
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01 Nov 2019

I keep seeing mention of "low resolution mode" in this thread (and others), but I don't see this anywhere in my Preferences or the Reason menus??? I'm running Reason 11 on a 27" (2560 x 1440) iMac with 70-year-old eyes, and better resolution would be wonderful. I use the Ctrl-Mouse-Wheel to screen zoom, but it just makes it bigger, blurrier!

dhruan
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01 Nov 2019

sch wrote:
01 Nov 2019
I keep seeing mention of "low resolution mode" in this thread (and others), but I don't see this anywhere in my Preferences or the Reason menus??? I'm running Reason 11 on a 27" (2560 x 1440) iMac with 70-year-old eyes, and better resolution would be wonderful. I use the Ctrl-Mouse-Wheel to screen zoom, but it just makes it bigger, blurrier!
It just means setting the resolution on your display device (monitor or in this case the display of the iMac) lower (less dots per inch) so that the fixed pixel UI of Reason appears larger.

You can find the settings to do so in Preferences > Display and setting the Resolution from "Default for display" to "Scaled" and setting it to your liking.
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sch
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01 Nov 2019

dhruan wrote:
01 Nov 2019
It just means setting the resolution on your display device (monitor or in this case the display of the iMac) lower (less dots per inch) so that the fixed pixel UI of Reason appears larger.

You can find the settings to do so in Preferences > Display and setting the Resolution from "Default for display" to "Scaled" and setting it to your liking.
Cheers, got it!

dhruan
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01 Nov 2019

Is developing software (as in coding) hard? Depends on the project.... but ok, do you know how to code C# (or any other programming language for starters)? If not then forget about it. You have no idea.

Talking about Reason... well, you can liken Reason to a city. Making changes to the city and especially to the infrastructure and the rules that it operates on (and that have a huge impact on it's inhabitants) is a daunting task to say the least.

There are huge amounts of dependencies and people that you need to involve and have a go ahead from in order to make any changes. So yeah, it is not just hard but you can not do it without the explicit say so of the people in charge. Also, did I mention that this city is not public but owned by a corporation that governs everything that is going on? So you can't even get out of the gate without their say so.

Ideas are great but developing software is hard. Implementing ideas can range from easy to impossible, even for simple shit. So while appreciating the sentiment I would steer you away from this to something more easily accessible and productive (unless you want to become a manager, product owner or a superstar coder at Reason Studios).
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selig
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01 Nov 2019

Tweak wrote:
01 Nov 2019
Coding an application fresh is one thing, adding functionality to an existing decade old code base, is something somewhat different.
^^THIS, big time^^
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guitfnky
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01 Nov 2019

updating an existing code base is different than starting from scratch, yes. it is difficult, yes. but the dev team has had >9 years to consider many of these features (probably fewer, for the high-DPI stuff, though). we know they can do the heavy lifting needed to make large-scale code changes—they’ve done it recently, with the VST/performance improvements in 10.4.

the only possible explanation is lack of willingness. nothing to do with difficulty or complexity.
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ForgottenClank
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01 Nov 2019

I've never worked on any GUIs other than Reason's SDK but I guess scalable graphics would require (or at least benefit from) vector based GUI. All the released REs would need to completely overhaul or even redesign their GUI/GUI elements. That seems like a difficult problem to tackle and a pain in the butt.

But I can assure that Reason Studios is aware of the issues and scalable graphics have been brought up recently by us developers as well. It sounded like they were trying to listen.

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Oquasec
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02 Nov 2019

Not unless you want props to rewrite Reason to be in SVG format lol
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fullforce
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02 Nov 2019

ForgottenClank wrote:
01 Nov 2019
I've never worked on any GUIs other than Reason's SDK but I guess scalable graphics would require (or at least benefit from) vector based GUI. All the released REs would need to completely overhaul or even redesign their GUI/GUI elements. That seems like a difficult problem to tackle and a pain in the butt.

But I can assure that Reason Studios is aware of the issues and scalable graphics have been brought up recently by us developers as well. It sounded like they were trying to listen.
A scaling engine could do it. It would require a powerful graphic card (1050 at least) but that would do the trick.
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