Some Fit and Finish Problems

When you're reviewing a product, you tend to be a little stricter on fit and finish issues. Especially this one. After all, Lucid Spec is supposedly helping you overcome a fit and finish problem: creating a GUI that works the way the user expects.

I was happy to see that Lucid immediately displays a tutorial when you start it for the first time. Unfortunately, the tutorial is behind the times. I found a number of problems on the first page alone. The URL that the tutorial provides for more tutorial information is incorrect (the correct URL, for now, is www.elegancetech.com/LS_Tutorial.aspx). The first page also talks about the released version being an "alpha (preliminary) version." Although the tutorial supplied works, you'll want to visit the Web site to view the current tutorial. The Web site also provides access to a quick tour, video tour, and online help.

I was also a little surprised that the tutorial lacks automation. You click on each page in the Specification window in turn. Elegance Technologies doesn't provide any way to move from page to page by clicking buttons or any of the other means that even manual tutorials use. The tutorial doesn't provide a very effective interface, which is very surprising given this kind of product.

The tutorial doesn't provide a very good introduction to a product that appears to work well in every other respect. The simple statement on their Web site, "You should see another tutorial, but ignore it for now" highlights the fact that Elegance Technologies is aware of this problem. Why they didn't fix it is anyone's guess.

The tutorial problems don't stop with the alpha tutorial included with the product. I tried all four offerings on the Web site. The tutorial begins by creating a new project. However, even this first step doesn't match the actual product performance. When you select the File | New command, Lucid does indeed create a new project, but it selects the Screen 1 entry, not the Entire Spec entry as shown in the graphic in the online tutorial.

This may seem nit-picky. But again, this software is supposedly helping you design better GUIs; yet, it has all kinds of fit and finish problems in the tutorial before you even begin using the product. When I did select the Entire Spec entry, the screenshot still doesn't precisely match what I saw on screen.

Some tutorial steps are also faulty. In step 10, the tutorial tells you how to set the JumpTo property for the Convert button on Screen1. However, it doesn't mention anything about Screen2. In step 11, the tutorial tells you to use the Simulate feature to jump back and forth between screens. Unfortunately, because you didn't set the JumpTo property for the Restart button, the tutorial step doesn't work. In short, the tutorials need a lot of work; the vendor assures me they will fix the problems in the next release.

The samples that the vendor provides are also extremely disappointing. I had expected to learn something new about designing a GUI, but the vendor has hardly documented the samples and one of them, the VCR sample, doesn't even work. In this example, clicking the power switch is supposed to shift the VCR between on and off states, but after trying the example several times, I gave up looking for any difference between the on and off states.