Undo and general comments

[IPC2000]

I've been using EA for a couple of months now at work and whilst on the whole I like the product, it is much quicker to use than Visio and far far cheaper than Rational Rose, I have some real problems with the user interface and its behaviour.
The thing that has just spurred me to write this message is that I accidently deleted a table whilst trying to delete a connector. No problem I thought, just undo and then its back again. Not the case. Undo just moved one of the other tables back to where it was earlier. This is a real gripe of mine. Undo just doesn't undo what you want it to. It is with real trepidation that I use it because I just don't know what it will try and undo. Almost certainly not the thing I wanted it to.
Other issues I have are:
Menus - I can spend ages trying to find the menu option I want. It seems totally unintuitive as to what menus items appear on which menu/context menu. An example of this is Set Diagram as Project Default
Copying Diagrams - It seems impossible to exactly copy diagrams. You can only copy objects in a diagram and not their relationships from what I can tell. I often am working on a sequence diagram and would like to copy it so I can modify the copy to show a different sequence. I can't reliably do this. Not without having to reconnect all the items on the diagram and/or create loads of duplicate copies of object instances.
Sequence Diagrams - It would be really handy to have time line branching, which I believe is part of the UML spec. I often have to create a whole new diagram to indicate this or add loads of notes when if I could simply branch the timeline my job would be done.
There are lots of other little things as well, but I can't remember them at the moment.

Anyway enough of this. Sorry for the long post. Don't get me wrong I do like the product, it just needs a bit of polishing to make it a real quality piece of software.

Cheers
Ian

[frank]

The thing that has just spurred me to write this message is that I accidently deleted a table whilst trying to delete a connector. No problem I thought, just undo and then its back again. Not the case. Undo just moved one of the other tables back to where it was earlier. This is a real gripe of mine. Undo just doesn't undo what you want it to.

I'm not sure if the undo functionality is generally weak or if it is just that object deletions are not undoable - it is only the latter that has bit me.  Just this morning I accidently deleted a class instead of an instance of that class and had to spend half an hour putting it back.  <Sigh>

Anyway enough of this. Sorry for the long post. Don't get me wrong I do like the product, it just needs a bit of polishing to make it a real quality piece of software.

It is rough around the edges, no question of that.  So far I am finding this to be an acceptible trade-off against the broad feature set and low cost.  I paid about Cdn $4K for my Rose license.  I am choosing to use EA instead of Rose even though it does not have the same polish.

The clincher for me is how incredibly responsive the Sparx systems folks have been.  I have found three bugs in Rose, one that was a real problem for me, and I waited months for fixes.  I have found a couple bugs in EQA as well, and never had to wait a full week for a fix.

Likewise the Sparx folks have been responsive to feature suggestions.  I don't bother making suggestions to most companies because I rarely get any response beyond "Thanks for the feedback."  Here on the other hand I get intelligent discussion about the proposed feature, and a couple times already I have seen the feature implemented.

These guys are building loyalty with me very quickly.

Frank.

[Molto Mike]

Sorry about chiming in, but I want to add my weigth to this request: ***Please make UNDO work.*** I fully agree w/ Ian, that the current implementation is almost useless, and that this is not acceptable for an authoring tool.

Mike

[gsparks]

Hi,

Some changes to the UNDO function will be going into build 579. There are still limitations in this feature based on the necessity of keeping the model repository in synch with real-time changes, however some of the 'surprising' results due to hidden saves etc. have been ironed out.

Also some additional changes have been captured - such as align functions, space across and down and resize.

Cheers,

Geoff Sparks

[IPC2000]

Thanks for that. I look forward to trying out the new build. It seems Frank may be correct with his high praise of your customer service.

Cheers
Ian