Hi All,
I've owned the SoftStep for many months and I _love_ the hardware itself. The software, on the other hand, is, and I hate to put it so bluntly, horrible.
I know this is something you've heard before, since the most viewed thread on this board is about the amount of memory the app takes, but I wanted to put it into perspective:
Here I have an assortment of apps sorted by the real memory they are occupying:
https://img.skitch.com/20110331-89cx2cx ... 8afh87.png
Here are my apps sorted by virtual memory:
https://img.skitch.com/20110331-qb2ynmk ... eu6ru6.png
You can see in the first image that the SoftStep app is consuming 942.8MB of real memory and another 1.07GB of virtual memory. This is *TEN TIMES* the amount of memory as Adobe Flash CS5. *FIFTEEN TIMES* more than Xcode. It consumes more memory than VMWare running an entire Windows XP partition.
This is just insane and completely unacceptable.
To put it into even more perspective, I have a Logidy UMI3, which is a simple three switch midi foot controller. It also comes with a translator - you can't see it in the activity monitor because it is taking 9.6 MB of real memory and 52MB of virtual - SoftStep.app is consuming almost 100x more real memory.
Please, please, please pay someone to convert your app from a gui wrapper on top of Max patches to a real bona-fide Cocoa app. Contact the Logidy folk and see if they can give you a head start.
And please understand that I am not trying to be confrontational or belligerent. I sincerely love the form factor and promise of the hardware. You owe it to yourselves, your customers, and the killer piece of gear you've created to scrap your Max patches and rebuild the software from the ground up.
Sincerely,
Ian