Category: Quilting - Moving Home Ec into High Tech!
Moving Home Ec into High Tech!
First of all ... Happy St. Patrick's Day to all!
I have had a chance to use Pattern-File over the past few weeks...and it has turned out better than what I had hoped. I did indeed select the subscription service. Not really all that happy about shelling out money every month for this thing, but when I saw what it did... I am now actually OK with it...well, sort of. I would prefer an annual fee like my GPS sticks me with for my iphone for MotionX (that is $20 a year) but I do digress.
My use of this software was to enter about 20+ patterns the other day...some of them 5 years old and younger.
Then I entered several patterns that were 5 years old, that I thought were going to be out of print (and they were), but had no graphic at all, could not prefill the pattern info, or had other numbers associated with the pattern (major pattern manufactures reuse numbers all the time... so this is -so- not Pattern-File's fault).
They are working on trying to tap into the older pattern info for the future however. I can wait. I am putting those that don't prefill in a pile right now, and maybe I can find the time to enter them manually...or before the planets align again for me to have "free time", they will have hooked into this information stream.
What I would like to see going forward is a lesser subscription fee/schedule. This is going to cost me $60 a year when all is said and done. I know these guys are small, and their overhead must be a bit more killer as they have less clout to negotiate with (as they are just getting their feet wet,) I do hope to see this more like $35 for the year when they can take on the big pattern manufacturers.
I would also like to see is more customizable dropdown fields. Currently, you can alter the drop down contents, but not the drop down field and what it says. I would like to have a record of what I paid for them, and that would be a bonus when I am tracking what I have turned around to sell on Ebay.
Also in the vein of tracking stuff... I would like an option to export all of my information into a csv file. I know that this is a "cloud" app... but they did have a hiccup the other day for the subscription service. It went down for a period of time. I would simply like the option to protect my information off line, incase they all hit the lottery and pull the plug on this project and retire to Tahiti or something.
They are NOW offering a 10 day trial! Which is a step forward in mybook! I think I would have bought it after 2 days of eval, as it is the best thing I have seen yet!!! And the promise of the iphone app is going to make me bump this to 4 out of 5 stars when it comes out!
This blog is my little corner to let you know of my discoveries and what issues I have seen in using creative textile software.