Hey, Robin here - the OP. Happy to answer any questions you might have about the software, hooking it up to your existing equipment, and whether it's applicable to your particular use-case.
To get the ball rolling, I'll share my personal experience. When I was studying engineering, we had to do a load of AutoCAD drawing. I found it a nightmare because you constantly had to type commands like "snap 10", "fillet radius 20", "fillet radius 10" etc.
It's worse because you have to move your right hand back and forth between typing commands on the keyboard and clicking the mouse.
At the time, I programmed an Arduino with a lot of the common pieces of text I was typing, and then wired the Arduino to a keypad so I could press a key and get it to type the text for me.
Have you had a similar problem in your engineering job? If so, how did you try to solve it?
Those are really good points - thanks for the well considered reasoning.
On the smartphone side, I think we use them very differently - you wouldn't do engineering design on a smartphone, for example, so this is maybe outside of the use-case I was thinking about. I don't think touch screens are that effective either - typing on them is a pain!
Your point about VR is very interesting though because people are starting to do complicated tasks like CAD and graphic design through VR. This does mean it's able to do tasks that typically people would spend a lot of time sat at a desk typing and clicking to achieve.
Having many 'virtual' computer monitors displayed through a VR or AR headset is not something I've ever thought about, but is a really cool possibility. Do you know of any examples?
FYI, I'm interested because I'm developing software that maps single physical keypresses (e.g. on your numpad) into complex control of applications: http://numpadsuperpowers.com
The above argument is kinda the founding philosophy so I want to make sure it's sound logic!
I have removed the email signup and allowed a direct download. So far, the rate of downloads has gone up by a factor of between 5 - 10 times. Hard to know precise numbers at this time but it's looking good!
I don't have large enough numbers of users to know how this will impact on conversion, but it follows logically that if the product is the main selling point, getting users to engage with it in the easiest way possible can only be a good thing.
I'm now looking at replacing the on-boarding emails I was using with an in-app on-boarding process.
Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and insight into this. You make some good points on why an email sign up may not be effective. Therefore, I am currently running a test to see how the website performs when the email signup is removed - it's a direct download.
P.S. For reference, the software product is here: https://numpadsuperpowers.com and currently still has an email signup requirement before downloading the free trial.
Hey, Robin here - the creator/developed of the above drag and drop automation software. Feel free to ask here if you have any questions - I'd be happy to answer!
Please let me know what you think of the software and whether it would be useful to you in automating tedious and repetitive computer actions.
Just to clear things up, this is a desktop app that you install and run by double clicking, just like any other app. It's designed to work with your numpad (either the numeric keypad built into your main keyboard, or a separate USB one).
You drag and drop commands like "type text" and "open folder" onto each of the buttons of your numpad. When you then press that numpad button, your automation is triggered!
However, to let people hook up their macropads, I made it also listen out for the keyboard shortcuts ctrl + alt + 1, ctrl + alt + 2 etc. as numpad button 1, numpad button 2 etc. respectively.
So if you can make your macropad do the keyboard shortcut ctrl + alt + 1, then my software will behave exactly the same as if you pressed numpad button 1 and will trigger the associated automation.
Let me know if you have any questions about your specific use case!
Hey, this is a fully fledged app, but I'm giving away the first 125 licenses for free (forever) to get a decent user base - feel free to grab one for yourself :)
I'd also be delighted to hear your thoughts/feedback on this - I hope it helps your productivity like it has for me!
