Popular Post JoshRivers 4 Posted April 13, 2018 Popular Post Share Posted April 13, 2018 Whoah. That new UI! What does it do? How does it work? Who knows? Despite some frustration with things being borked and needing uninstalls/registry cleanups/cloud logins, etc (the link below is an essential reference) I did manage to get everything working. I even managed to get a connection from my weirdly networked machine that I didn't figure I'd be able to get working until there was a manual settings file. The new UX is unsettling. The windows tray / mac menubar helper doesn't have any way of showing what's going on...you have to open a different app. The Synergy App looks fine when things are working but provides no affordances for figuring out what you are supposed to try next if it's jammed. There are definitely some feature regressions (yep. already on the roadmap.). The Beta process was also long and frustrating. I'm actually back to Synergy after 6 months happy (but struggling) with a different software keyboard-mouse sharing 'ware. It was way better than the last beta I tried, and had some neat features I wouldn't mind seeing in Synergy. All of that said. Synergy 2 is BRILLIANT! WONDERFUL! Thank you so much! 1) This type of software is *so vital* to my happiness during the day. I need it so much! I know how all of the frustrate people in this forum feel, since it is probably just as vital to them. I also see how incredibly difficult just keeping keyboard/mouse sharing has become over the last decade. Remotely pwning the console is something 2018 operating systems resist very actively. You deserve more than I've paid you just for keeping the software live through so many breaking OS changes. Thank you! 2) When I figured out the trick to switch which computer was the controller, and popped my master keyboard/mouse from host to host, I was just FLOORED. Not only can my mouse swing from screen to screen and control every computer at my battlestation, but I can switch to a different machine and control all the others from there? SO HAPPY! Thank you! Somehow it feels like getting thousands of dollars of extra computer power..but for $15. This is such an impressive achievement, and fits so nicely in the control of my screen layouts. (Being able to control this switch from the tray icon, and having a command-line way of affecting control <something I can control with AutoHotKey or Keyboard Maestro?> would be very nice too?) 3) I've just spent 2 months at work with a team of 10, delivering the very smallest piece of software I can imagine. I know the whole forum is on you to hurry up with <insert pet feature>, and I can't wait either, but all software takes time, and few of us have any clue how much you folks are doing and with how few resources. Thank you! For reference, one of my other utilities that does a little tiny (technically hard) task that I have trouble living without was developed, dropped, passed to a new company, abandoned, open sourced, abandoned, redeveloped from scratch, and now is available in 2 forms: 1) old, broken, unsupported on an up-to-date OS and 2) $100. Did I mention software is hard and takes time (and money)? You guys are doing great work and at such a reasonable cost. Please keep going, because I'd ache if we lost maintenance on Synergy. Thank you! So, yeah. It was a bit of a challenge getting up to date with 2 and getting it running. I've got all sorts of peanut-gallery suggestions and demands. Sure, I'm not 100% happy and there are things I miss about the older versions. But mostly: WOW! This is great! It's an ambitious, real effort to take an essential utility and modernize it (operating systems, networks, and usage has changed a little bit since 1996, hasn't it?). I see a lot of complaints around here, so I wanted to spend a few minutes and thank you for the huge good you've accomplished. -Josh 1 3 Link to post Share on other sites
Synergy Team Popular Post Nick Bolton 407 Posted April 13, 2018 Synergy Team Popular Post Share Posted April 13, 2018 Wooow. Thank you so much Josh. Finally, someone who gets it. And, you’re also someone who is genuinely running a dev team which I’m delighted to see. You wouldn’t believe how many “I’ve been running a software company for 20 years” type people we get telling us we don’t know how to code, and they could fix Synergy in a few weeks. We know the Synergy 2 config app is stark, extremely so. This state is temporary as we wanted to start from a clean slate so that the UX could re-grow organically based on the most important requirements from a stable base (which is proving more than difficult to achieve, despite how simple the tool seems). We know from experience that driving development by asking people what they want usually doesn’t work very well, as this is how we ended up with a really busy and badly designed UI in Synergy 1 (and of course we don’t intend to repeat this mistake). As the famous saying goes: If I asked people what they wanted, they’d say “A faster horse!” So, while Synergy 2.0 is stark for now, 2.1 will have a settings screen, and we will be adding to the UI organically and gradually based on our own intuition and from speaking to customers. Right now, and probably for the next 6 months we’ll be focusing on stability, so the UI probably won’t change much, but sit tight, it’s going to get a whole lot better. Often we won’t immediately do exactly as users ask, but what we do is always with the intention of creating a great product. 1 1 Link to post Share on other sites
Robert Krpoun 6 Posted April 13, 2018 Share Posted April 13, 2018 Ok, so that title is a bit of a misrepresentation! I am loving it too! I've been a looong-time user, and been in a wild variety of network configs, and I am always happy in the end. Keep up the good work, gang! Link to post Share on other sites
redcollective 0 Posted April 14, 2018 Share Posted April 14, 2018 Josh your point about 2) re the automatic control master switching is what keeps me hanging on for support for Synergy 2 in my linux distro. Synergy is essential if you use multiple machines for work, and this feature in particular will be one of those which feels so 'natural' we'll forget it was ever any different. Keep your chin up Nick! Link to post Share on other sites
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