Is Studiometry "plug and play"?

May 7, 2009 9:12 AM

Looking for heavy users to tell me all I need to know about Studiometry. Good? Bad? Good-but-buggy? Fast or freezes frequently?

We're looking at studiometry as a billing, invoicing, dashboard ("how's business going this month?") tool. I just want to know if it's decent. What it needs to be: fast and intuitive and just nice.

Dealbreakers are: frequent bugs, freezes or slowness, and counterintuitive stuff ("how the hell do I add a client, and how the hell do I send him a bill").

And no, we don't want Basecamp.

posted by NekulturnY to computers & internet (2 comments total)

Update: does it work on Vista seems to be an important question too.
posted by NekulturnY at 3:36 AM on May 8

My experiences with Studiometry are almost 3 years old, but I'll tell you what I know. S is very mac-like, so if you aren't used to using mac apps it might be a little work for you to get around. So it might be counter intuitive for a windows user. My one problem was adding clients, but I learned that clicking the plus side on the client list added a client. (That wasn't documented) Studiometry is written in RealBasic, which the developer did to reach as wide a possible audience as possible - since RealBasic is supposed to be cross platform out of the box. It works, most of the time. So the problems with the windows ports of S he might not be able to to fix since it is a RealBasic problem. The windows problems I were having were glitch UI redrawing, it was very irritating. I ended up trying to get a refund. In the end I had to do it thru my credit card company to get a refund because oranged was unresponsive. I'm fairly sure Oranged.net software is pretty much just a one person company. Now remember, this is my experience as of 3 years ago, things have probably gotten better. Looking at his change logs for studiometry, the developer seems fairly busy fixing bugs and adding features. There is a studiometry user's forum, but it seems fairly inactive.

So the problems I have with oranged and studiometry are in summary:

* oranged.net is probably too small of a company to handle issues into the future and it looks their user base is drying up - the user forum should be alot more active for a major product. (Historically the prices of studiometry have been rising about 10-20% per new release)

* Support for studiometry is a two applications support for RealBasic and Studiometry - this is troublesome for many reasons.

* I am now extremely adverse to locking my data into a proprietary format that I can't manipulate freely.

Things may have changed though, S still does have a 30 day trial - I would give it a spin for a month and see how things work out if these issues I've listed don't bother you. I think it might be better for you to use an accounting package (studiometry does not have full accounting capabilities) + a project management package instead of studiometry.
posted by Drama Penguin at 12:20 PM on May 8