Help request for using Roast Time 2.2.0 and this web site

Feature Suggestions Roast.Time Software
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Hello, I’ve been using (and absolutely loving) my Bullet for almost a year now. I recently bit the bullet and finally upgraded to Roast Time 2.2.0. While I can use it to roast, I’m totally lost about how to really use the software as effectively as the old version. I can’t figure out how to make the saved roasts meaningful as reference, use bean names, make notes, import the beans I had in the old software etc. There is a message in Update Roast Profile Details that I should log in to view my bean list, but WHERE do I login?

I’m also at a loss as to how to use Roast World site effectively. The “Badges” mentions a level of having completed a tutorial, but using the search feature returns nothing related to tutorials. From what I can read in the topics there is no manual available for the new Roast Time 2.2.0 software. Is that correct? Is there no documentation or tips and tricks page available to help an idiot who can’t figure this out on his own? Sorry for the newbie questions, but I’m rather at a loss. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

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Hi there! We do actually have a great deal of information up now at Aillio Bullet R1 V2: Getting Started | by Aillio | Medium

It’s geared toward new owners but just about anyone can benefit from the articles. One of them gives general roasting advice, and the other introduces how to use RT2. Hopefully it helps!

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I’ve only been on the newer versions of RoasTime. Having the capability to make “notes” that are connected to the Roast result (graph and data) would be useful.

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Log into https://roast.world to see and edit beans, roasts, profiles, etc.

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I forgot to clarify that I would like to have the ability to make roast notes in off-line mode which is where I primarily operate with this roaster.

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This may not be what you are looking for, but I was able to go into RoastWorld, select a profile from “My Roasts” and using the “Edit” button above the roast name, add comments into my “Roast Notes” (bottom right of screen) after cupping.

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@wngsprd - My preference is to make notes right after the roast is complete within the RoasTime software. The time to record those thoughts (for me) is best when what just happened is fresh on my mind.

But you do raise an important point that the folks at Aillio need to consider. Whether the Bullet User prefers to work in on-line or off-line mode, we need the same basic tools between either of those two modes. It seems they structured use to primarily depend on being on-line. I get that and don’t have a problem with it. But, do also give the off-line roasters some of those same tools so that we can intelligently interact with our roast data without having to be online to have them.

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thank you all for your help. I was able to find How To Use RoasTime 2 | by Aillio | Medium which helped me as did your posts. probably just showing my ignorance, but it is so confusing to need to go to so many different locations to find the information.

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@jacob, @jonas, @eli, all Aillio folks:

Here we go again. New users are EXTREMELY CONFUSED by your “documentation.” We’ve been telling you this for a while. It needs to be addressed.

We have the Aillio web site, the RoasTime download page, the Roast World site, and the blogging site with a few relevant articles. Of all of those, one article on the blogging site seems most useful for finding all the rest of the important information, assuming you already know which version of the Bullet you have. This is not at all what anyone would expect.

Logic would dictate that a support page on the Aillio site (aillio.com) would be the best jumping off point for all info regarding the various versions of the Bullet. A single page could be dedicated to descriptions of the versions, so people know what they’ve got. Then, one page for each version, stating what software and firmware is available, providing manuals, tutorials, etc.

Note that Facebook is not a solution to this (or any) problem. You shouldn’t expect all your users to subject themselves to that one truly annoying platform, in order to get the info they need.

The faster you fix this, the fewer of your customers will start their user experience in utter frustration and the less effort you will have to spend winning them back.

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Agree on the Facebook comment from CelticCup. I do not, nor will I ever use Facebook for a whole lot of reasons that I’ll just keep to myself. All too often today companies think that people want to use Facebook to access information about their product. That is just not a complete truth. Companies have a responsibility to their customers (Facebookers and non) to make all company provided product information available on a “company website”.

I understand where Celtic is coming from on getting this stuff better organized. I also agree that it can be particularly difficult for new customers to locate information. I feel that the Aillio folks may be stretched thin in staying on top of this and other matters that have been routinely discussed in this forum. I’m not judging them either (walk a mile in the shoes…). I feel they are doing the best with what they have at the moment and hope it gets better in this regard.

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@celticcupcoffee, @PapasCup Thanks for the feedback. I’m not sure what you mean about relying on FB. We do share our newsletters on FB, but we also link important information on the website soon after it is compiled. Maybe I am misunderstanding what you mean.

On the other hand, we absolutely agree that it has been difficult for new users to access all the information they need to get started, particular at this juncture where there are so many hardware and software changes simultaneously being made to improve the Aillio ‘ecosystem’, and everything is brand new and not always intuitive. That’s why we’ve created the url Aillio Bullet R1 V2: Getting Started | by Aillio | Medium . We just finished it up on Friday of last week. These are the steps we’ve taken to spread it so far:

  1. We sent a newsletter out about it on Saturday (maybe you saw this on FB and thought it was only an FB post?).
  2. Users will also receive an email with this link when they first order the V2.
  3. The new package inserts being mailed with V2 Bullets also already point users to this url.
  4. As of Monday morning, the getting-started link and a couple of key articles contained therein are now also available from the main www.aillio.com menu.
  5. When people email [email protected], they are linked to this URL in the auto-reply.

In other words, we definitely want to make sure people find it. And we’re not expecting people to use FB to do so. Nor we do expect them to be constantly checking the aillio.com site for updates, so we need things like FB and newsletters and this community to spread the word sometimes.

We will continue to keep this URL updated, but we also know the look and experience of this documentation is less than ideal. We will be redesigning the aillio.com webpage once we have time, with a knowledge base (or something along those lines) that will probably be similar to what you mentioned, Celtic, and with a much sleeker design than a collection of Medium articles. The problem is that the way the website is currently configured, it isn’t possible to make it look or behave the way we want it to. We’re limited by this. But as PapasCup mentioned, we are already working on a lot of different projects in parallel.

So, in the meantime, we decided to consolidate all the important info for new users in a single place so that they can get started with roasting. We are still working on providing more documentation for everyone, and we’d definitely be interested in hearing what you’d like to see in place in the future. We know this is an area in which we can improve and we want it to be as smooth an experience as we can provide.

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@kafei,

Hopefully, I can provide more clarity on the FB issue. From my perspective, all I was saying is that Aillio should not automatically expect all their users to be on FB. I have no way of judging what you currently have up on FB, since I don’t use it. I can’t speak for @PapasCup, but it sounds like his experience is similar.

From your response, it seems that you have not assumed FB access, but use it as a parallel info channel. I certainly have no problems with that.

It appears that you’ve taken some steps to alleviate the documentation issue. As it turns out, I did receive that newsletter, but overlooked it, somehow. My apologies for that. It looks like a fairly good effort at collecting things into one area and getting the word out.

When you get around to redesigning aillio.com, please don’t rely on a knowledge base to convey important information. Those systems can only be as good as the queries they support and the ability of a user to know exactly what query to pose. In practice, you almost need to be an expert in a subject to use a knowledge base correctly. They tend to be nearly useless for the new users, who need them most.

Users will be much better served by a well organized set of pages, presenting well written text in natural language - a type of writing that you guys excel at, by the way. It definitely takes longer to put this sort of site together, but it is SO much more functional than slapping a knowledge base interface on your site and assuming that it gives everybody access to all the info.

I hope you will accept this in the spirit in which it’s written. I really want to help you make the Bullet (and Bullseye) a great product with stellar support. My last post was a bit harsh. I’m sorry about that, but I was trying to voice the frustration that I have felt as a new user of the Bullet and that I’ve seen others experiencing. I may have gotten a bit carried away.

Thanks for taking the time to respond thoughtfully!

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@kafei Thanks for the response. An example of the problem with Facebook is this comment from you:

“We do share our newsletters on FB, but we also link important information on the website soon after it is compiled.” “We sent a newsletter out about it on Saturday (maybe you saw this on FB and thought it was only an FB post?).”

I don’t ever go to Facebook for anything as do a lot of other people that I know in the US that don’t participate at Facebook. So, if an announcement about the latest “newsletter” and “other important information” is being posted on Facebook from Aillio, I’ll never see it.

On the Newsletter, I signed up for it when I first started using the Bullet and have never seen a Newsletter from Aillio. So, as a non-Facebook participant, how am I supposed to know one was released like the one that you said was just released on Saturday? I’m going to sign-up for it again via the link on the main Aillio site, but there may be a mail distribution/database problem. So, where does a non-Facebook person obtain a copy of the Newsletter from Saturday?

In case anyone else needs the link to signing up for Newsletters, here’s the direct link:
Newsletter enrollment

The “Medium.com” website is new to many of us. I would not have known you folks switched to using it if another User here hadn’t posted it recently. That’s another example of not having a good communication method to existing customers. Also, this statement (from Aillio) appears at the bottom of the Aillio page at Medium.com. " Never miss a story from Aillio , when you sign up for Medium." So are we also being expected to join/open an account at Medium.com? IMO, people should not “have” to join that site just to know the latest from Aillio.

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I did not know about the new V2 Getting Started document, even though I previously signed up for notifications. (I even checked my spam folder)

When I search the Medium site for documents about Aillio and also look at the Aillio profile in Medium, this new V2 Getting Started document does not show up and also the linked documents in the getting started are also not displayed. It appears like you need to know the link to find the information.

If you’re going to use Medium to publish support documents, you should make it easier to find them without having to contact Aillio support.

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Thanks for the thoughtful post. Don’t worry, the knowledge base (type thing) won’t replace the articles. One of the reasons why we have steered away from it so far is that we haven’t found a method of organizing it that would feel suitable, but we’re going to look at some other platforms that provide some more flexibility, so hopefully we’ll have a nice, easy to navigate interface that can link people with the info they need quickly. As you mentioned, it’s easy for knowledge base driven support centers to become irritants.

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Thanks for the clarification. Just to clarify our end: We don’t expect users to sign up for Medium. We’re using the platform because it is easy to use and looks good. As we mentioned above, we discovered some limitations in the Aillio website backend that forced our hand to look elsewhere, at least temporarily. The statement you see at the bottom encouraging you to register is automatically generated by Medium. The fact that it is Medium isn’t important, it’s just a space for articles. Aillio Bullet R1 V2: Getting Started | by Aillio | Medium points at Medium now but may not in the future. We provide direct links in all our newsletters and from our website to all of the relevant Medium articles. This is where we expect you to access them from.

We also need to point out that we are limited by GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation. In order to send out newsletters we have to have your specific consent to do so. Some of the email addresses we collected were not collected according to GDPR guidelines so we had to erase them from the list. Before we did this we emailed everyone to let them know we would need to do this, but not everyone re-registered. This happened last year in May around the time GDPR was being enforced. I can’t say for sure if that is why you didn’t receive the newsletter, but it is a possibility. Another (more likely) one is that they have been sending to your Spam folder.

I want to look into whether there is some other problem, though, just in case. Can you send a mail to [email protected] with the mail you used to sign up? Maybe we can check our list to see…

“So, where does a non-Facebook person obtain a copy of the Newsletter from Saturday?” – The website already has all of the information contained in the newsletter under the ‘Support’ section, so regularly visiting the website would lead you to the same articles.

If you sign up for the newsletter you may notice that there is a link to the archive of newsletters. We’ve considered posting this link to the archive directly on the site, maybe that would help out those looking to dig for past info. The thing is… given how much Aillio has evolved, a lot of that info isn’t relevant and could confuse people, and we already have so much info on the site. ( Aillio Technology Co., Ltd )

Look at it from our perspective too. Assuming someone doesn’t sign up for the newsletter (I realize you did try to…) and we can’t email them, they don’t email us, they don’t check the website (where some Medium articles have already been posted for 6 months), and they don’t use Facebook, then I’m not sure what else we can do? I don’t feel like we are relying on Facebook to spread information, to be frank. We’re doing our best to spread it far and wide via other means, including participation in this community. I know there are plans for Roast.World to have some sort of Newsfeed in the future… maybe that would help some.

That said I’m really glad you shared your experience with us, it gives us another perspective and maybe we can figure out something new…

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@kafei When I registered again yesterday to receive Newsletters, I got several emails from Aillio and one of them was to confirm my email address. So, the email comm appears to be working now. I have no SPAM filters on Aillio and the only ones that I do employ are specifically done by me to prevent known SPAM senders.

I read your response on going to the main Aillio site and reading all the Support docs. While I can do that and have visited the main Aillio site many times, it begs the question, why not just post your Newsletters on the Aillio site under the “Stories and Articles” menu category? Seems like a no-brainer to me if Newsletter publication will be a continuing thing for Aillio. Thank-you for the “off-the-menu” link to where I can (for now) find stuff that may interest me (like the most recent newsletter). :sunglasses:

To your concern about posting past articles and newsletters as the Aillio evolves, I get what you are thinking. I’d also submit that there are those of your customers that are very used to knowing the difference between old and new information. For me, it is better to have access to information than to have it scrubbed down to the point that I have very little of it to consider. That is kind of where my head is today with Aillio. I feel that there is too little information available to me from the company which is why I pay such close attention to this particular forum. :wink:

I do want you to understand one important thing. I’m very appreciative that you, Jacob and others at Aillio engage your customers right here. That is very refreshing for a company to do that and something that I feel sets you apart from many other companies. You are doing a lot more things right than anything and I believe that many of us understand your growing pains. We’re here to help you more than anything else to make this long awaited product the best that it can be. :vulcan_salute:

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@tclarkaway Came me here looking for the so called tutorial because the ‘Licensed’ badge too.

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Aillio Bullet R1 V2: Getting Started | by Aillio | Medium has all the documentation for now