Thanks for everyone's feedback in this thread. I know some of this has been addressed by Mathias and others, but I'd like to address a few of the questions that have been asked.
- Non-implemented feats & class abilities: Some of the new abilities in question, like the archetypes which give you multiple minions and special weapons to use, are going to require some changes to Hero Lab and the core Pathfinder data files before we can make them work. As a result, until now they've taken a back seat to entering new content, like (initially) Ultimate Magic and (now) Ultimate Combat. Those books have a whole lot of new stuff in them!
This is a major concern of ours that we'll be looking to address after Gen Con, once we have Ultimate Combat completely entered. I can't promise that we'll fix all of the non-implemented stuff, but we'll do our best to tackle all that we can, especially since some of these abilities are becoming more and more common as time goes on.
- Tactical console: The tactical console does a great job of helping GMs run encounters, but there's still a lot that we could automate or make easier / more convenient there. This is something that we had originally hoped to add to Hero Lab 3.7, but other factors like custom output, working on the Mac version, and incorporating all of the new Pathfinder content that's arriving forced us to push it back. It's still on our to-do list for a future update.
As ShadowChemosh suggested, you can check out Combat Manager if you want a more encounter-focused tool right now. I believe it reads in Hero Lab portfolios, so you should still be able to use the encounters you create in Hero Lab with it.
- Adventure Path Monsters & Encounters: We've been trying to squeeze these into our schedule for a long time; unfortunately they've so far been eclipsed by all of the other Pathfinder content that we have to handle. This is something we evaluate every time that we have our "OK, what next" meetings, and we're trying to make it happen with our limited resources. I agree that it would be awesome to have.
- Third-Party Software: If you're looking at making third-party software interoperate with Hero Lab, we recommend using the new custom output mechanism to do that. You can either read in the raw XML generated by our custom output, or you can write your own custom output type to invoke your application directly when the user wants it.
Someone requested that we provide the capability for external tools to read in a Hero Lab portfolio, make changes to it, and then write it out again in a way that can be read by Hero Lab. First, let me say that this is incredibly complicated. The Hero Lab saved file format is very complex, and not something that a third-party application can reasonably modify without us reworking it from the ground up.
However, we've recently decided to approach this problem from a different angle which will hopefully have much the same result for users. It'll be a while before we can say more about this, but it is on our radar.
A lot of the above are things we'd really like to do, but simply don't have the bandwidth for right now. This is something we're working on addressing in the future - everything above is on our long-term Hero Lab roadmap, and we want to incorporate as much as we can.
Thanks for your comments and feedback, all!