Eric Bateman

It's funny that you call out the keyboard, Tom (our support engineer) thinks it's ridiculous to have a 127 key keyboard in the first place. Unfortunately the keyboard UI is a completely 100% bespoke piece of graphics code that I didn't write. There be dragons there. To change it would be a complete rewrite, and unfortunately I have to focus on fixing some bugs with our other products. Keep in mind we are starting a completely new project this year, several new products, and we have 3 employees (myself included) and a handful of contractors. So I don't think I'm going to get to any UI rewrites for 12 Step in the next 18 months. Keith had an interesting sense of humor. For the record, there are 13 keys on the device, and we half/seriously considered calling the updated product the 13 Step. I appreciate the feedback, and you're totally correct. The DPI scaling on Windows really broke a lot of older apps, 12 Step was originally written in Qt4 for reference. When I increased the size of the UI I tested on 1080p and 4K monitors of various sizes at 100% scaling, and found that to be a decent compromise. On 13" laptops or 50" displays things might become tricky, but without a full rewrite using QML the current size will have to do. I forget if we've added any info about scaling to the updated manual, but our real metric for any issue is our support ticket system, and when we updated the Editor/UI we ended a long run of regular tickets where people were having issues with the old editor either a) not running at all, or b) having issues with the UI size / fonts etc. This thread is honestly the first time it's come up since then, and we handle thousands of of tickets a year.

I totally understand and have been there myself. I will even admit, in the past I've been "that guy" when it comes to contacting support. The screen resolution "bug" you referenced with Tom was actually the facelift we did when we released the update for 12 Step 2, mainly switching to vector graphics and increasing the size so that it didn't look like a postage stamp at 100% scaling. I don't remember when that was released, but it was in 2023. The scaling issues on Windows are largely to due to the editors being written before HD displays were commonplace, and before the release of Windows 10/11, there wasn't and OS scaling to worry about. For reference, the QuNexus, 12 Step, SoftStep, QuNeo, and K-Mix editors were all written in Qt with no layouts, no methods to rescale or resize, and ton of explicit code to handle all sorts of UI corner cases. None had been updated since 2016 when I joined the company, and I had zero prior experience with Qt. My priority in bringing them up to date has been backend cleanup and functionality, consolidating snowflake code into shared libraries, and fixing bugs. We did add a lot of features into QuNexus and now the Steps with their re-release, so there's been cleanup and consolidation there as well. All of this work has been largely in my spare time, even with the re-releases these products are not creating enough revenue to justify a ton of engineering time. So with the UI, rewriting things to be re-sizeable was never an option, I had to pick a resolution that would work well on different size screens, but with Windows the scale factor is always going to affect how things look. ...only a little bit :). The random note issue you found was a bug introduced in fw 1.0.5. I made a longer post in the facebook group, but basically we had some users complaining that the latency on the key action was slow, so we naively put out an update that sped things up. It tested fine on the new hardware (which had many improvements in the PCB), but some legacy users (and from your support ticket it looks like you bought your 12 Step 9 years ago) ended up having phantom notes triggered by electrical noise. So, lesson learned - never listen to customer feature requests (sarcasm). But we did find a fix (1.0.7) that solved the noise and kept the latency low.

We did release an update (3.0.7) a few days ago, but it wouldn't have addressed your scaling being set to 150%. Right, so again I have to ask - why all the hate? Please re-read your original post from my perspective and think about your condescending (and downright insulting) language and tone. All because you had your scaling cranked up too high. I found your post because I was googling for background info to complete a blog post that I was writing to help legacy customers, in some cases people who bought a $350 product from us 12 years ago, use our software. If I was required to submit a revenue neutral/positive business plan to justify my hours doing this work, I'd be denied. I do it because I love our products and I want our legacy customers to trust us. At times it can be a very thankless job because most of the feedback we get are posts like this, either on forums or social media. Please take more care in the future.

Hi @tauzero, I'm the monkey that you're referring to. Why all the hate? I've spent many hours of my life trying to improve the KMI products and editors. When I started, some of them wouldn't even run on a modern computer without hacks and workarounds. "A total rewrite using proper Windows APIs" That would be another several hundred hours of work, you're talking tens of thousands of dollars in engineering time. I'm sorry you don't like my work, but believe me when I tell you that the editors and firmware are in a way better state than they were when I took over the project. Check out this screenshot, this is what the old 12 Step 2.0 editor looks like if you try to run it on Windows 11.