Yes, well.
I look at it like this.
This forum, plus bug/feature reports, are the only way we, mere paying users have, of addressing Sparx (I distinguish us from the trainers, etc mentioned elsewhere who are granted to power of knowing what we want better than we do). I live in hope that others will read posts from, dare I say it, we power users, and support the suggestions made, or even submit a supporting feature request.
EA is the tool I've got to work with, I much prefer it to word and visio for my professional practice, but when my outputs, generated from EA (documents) or sourced from EA (diagrams) are up against a word document, or Visio diagram, its clear that presentation counts.
Oh and speaking as a trainer (at least informally internally) most of my posts also reflect questions I have been asked about how to achieve something in a model or diagram (... I can do this in Visio, Powerpoint, Excel, how do I do it in EA ...)
We have had discussions elsewhere about the importance/relevance of diagrams in modelling and UML, but to me diagrams are highly important in communicating the views of the model I need to provide to advocate for a solution, and to guide and direct that solution.
Hence my focus on improving the usability and look and feel of diagrams. Heck, there is a lot of good stuff in diagrams, but a lot of basic stuff that is just plain missing, and would not be rocket science or break existing stuff to implement (I'd like to think).
It has been observed by others that some features are 'sales-ware', added to tick a box. For me org charts and flow charts come to mind. I'd like to use them and have tried, but in practice its had to believe that they even went through technical testing (let alone usability testing), and in use they are more like beta releases (whiteboard and hand drawn also spring to mind). Like most software these need versions two and three before they achieve maturity. I'm waiting.
The main positive I get from this is I know there are good people from Sparx reading these. The depressing aspect is that we have no idea of whether anyone further into the organisation, or at the top, is interested in engaging with customers using this forum, or leveraging it.
