Lately I've been getting a good amount of time to work on a rewrite of the software I use at the coffee roaster. Today I'm redesigning the indicators that show timing information to consolidate all the different kinds of timing data into a single display panel while also allowing more options for customization.
I'll be doing similar things for other kinds of measurements. Kind of excited about this. The design sketches and draft implementations look very good and it seems like an obvious direction for this kind of software to move in, yet at the same time it doesn't look like any of the competing software that's popped up since I first released mine is exploring anything in this space.
In my experience, anything that makes it easier to see what you're doing and how that compares with what you planned on doing makes for a more enjoyable coffee roasting experience with greater batch to batch consistency and fewer mistakes. My software is already very solid in that regard (there are some features that are absent or badly implemented elsewhere that help a lot) but hopefully this is an improvement (if it's not, I can revert the design without too much trouble).
That gets to the advantage of having the person writing the software doing the work the software is supposed to help with. I have enough data that I can look at production consistency metrics when using different features before inflicting them on others and there are some features in competing programs that I will never implement because they're provably terrible ideas.