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You know what else tends to have poor ux in my experience? Overly priced specialized commercial software targeted towards a specific industry.

I think the worst i've ever experienced between floss and commercial software had to be the software to program the waterjet cnc at my last job. For some reason, half the menu items were in german, all the configuration was done in a text file where variables were a mix between english and german, the machine manufacturer stopped officially supporting the program and literally one person at their tech support office even knew how to use it and his knowledge had gotten pretty rusty. That program was an ugly, bug ridden, confusing mess that at one time cost lots of money.

According to the tech i talked to, it was written by one german guy who had a poor grasp of english, vanished years before and nobody knew how to contact him.



The CAM software that came with the 4wK laser I use at work had an amazing nesting algorithm, but was otherwise entirely unsuited to our needs.

SigmaTech make SigmaNest which, as of version 1.7, I feel confident in highly recommending.

And they’ve put on an additional team member for tech support in my region and I can now confidently praise that aspect of their business too.


We used alphacam for our routers, but my boss was delaying paying for another alphacam license for as long as possible. It was nearly $10k per license or something.


Similar price rang for SigmaNest for the features we use, ongoing maintenance is under AUD$5k per year which we’re happy with.

I’ll have a look at Alphacam.




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