If you could choose your name, would you choose the one you were given?

I have a grey haired aunt I’ve been calling Sheila all my life. Yesterday I discovered her name is actually Julia. Now, strange as this may seem, it’s not all that unusual for the women in my mother’s family. Jenny is really Jane, Lily was born Margaret, Nancy is Anne, and Joan was once Josephine.

So what’s in a name anyway?

Sure, Josephine has that whole Napoleonic thing going for it, but does it really compare to Ingrid Bergman in a shiny suit of armour? Margaret may have the feel of a grand Faustian drama, but I’m betting Lily the drag queen has much more fun.

Why don’t more of us choose our own name? We choose our friends; we choose our lovers; we choose the clothes we wear; we pretty much choose the lives we live; but till the day we die, most of us carry the name we were given years ago.

I scratched my head for days trying to come up with a name for PageFour.

Naming a child is easy - there are a finite number of names to choose from. Unless you’re a rock star or a football player, in which case naming your poor unfortunate after a New York suburb is quite acceptable. But how do you pick a name for a piece of software?

You could name it for what it does. But the software world is riddled with products of suspect quality called Word, Journal something or other, and Novel whatever. You could name it Fred, but that’s even stranger than naming your child Brooklyn.

Or maybe not. Fred does have a certain gritty charm; and let’s face it, we all know someone called Fred. I could make a killing every Christmas. ‘Fred - Novel Writing Software‘ could become the new pair of socks for aspiring writers the world over whose parents called them Fred.

I chose a practical name that sounded neat. PageOne was already taken by cheap bookshops on every high street in the country. PageTwo sounded just a little like settling for second best. PageThree? Well, like many an Irish person, I often have trouble with those ‘th’s,’ so that was never going to work. PageFour was the one for me.

Four is a strong, respectable number - clearly much better than three, but at the same time not as pretentious as five. I can live with PageFour.

Now, time to turn my attention to Darren.

PageFour has been cracked.

For those of you too honest to know what cracking is, let me enlighten you. It’s when some shady hacker type character working out of a dingy bedroom in Bucharest downloads your software, hacks it in such a way that any license restrictions are overridden, and releases the ‘crack’ to the entire world.

Version 1.28 went live last Saturday evening, and by Wednesday the deed was done - downloads went through the roof; referrals from very shady sites in Hong Kong and Russia were way up; and I came within a hairs breadth of a coronary.

Team AGGRESSiON were the party responsible. Note the small ‘i’ in AGGRESSiON - I’m sure it has great meaning amongst the hacking and cracking fraternity.

I’ll be honest, I had a bit of an emotional reaction when I found out. The cursing and swearing was heard from Hampton Court Palace all the way to Putney Bridge. I spent a frantic hour adding URLs to my htaccess file and worrying over the bandwidth being consumed before retiring to a very unpeaceful rest.

But the dawn of a new day brought a whole new perspective.

Does it do me any harm?

Not that I can see. So there are hundreds of new PageFour users in China and the developing world - all churning out novels at a ferocious rate thanks to my innovative designs. Who knows, I may be single handedly responsible for a literary renaissance in the far east.

Would any of these people who downloaded the cracked software have actually bought the product? A simple no.

Will it increase the visibility of the product? Well, it won’t do it any harm.

So where’s the downside?

Honestly, these isn’t one that I can see. Downloads have continued over the past few days, though not at quite the furious rate of days 1 and 2, and my bandwidth is pretty high, so no problem there.

I choose to take it as a complement. After all, they only crack the good stuff, right?

We all know how the Secret Santa thing is supposed to go. You pull a random name out of a hat, hope the corresponding person has a sense of humour, spend a few pounds buying them something incredibly tacky that maybe gets a laugh when it’s opened, and everyone goes home happy.

No one knows it was you who bought the furry handcuffs, and that dodgy Barbie and Ken wrapping paper? Don’t look at me.

Until the hat disappears that is, and random is random no more.

I kid you not. At the nine to five on Monday morning, everyone received a white envelope with a name and a ten pound note inside. The question I have is: Who has THE LIST?

The whole point of Secret Santa, beyond the enforced camaraderie and the ‘aren’t we a very close and happy company‘ spiel, is the secret part. You buy something that perhaps says more about you than the ungrateful recipient; something that causes a blush or three from someone who never blushes. But you do so with the full knowledge that no one will ever know it was you. When asked, you simply claim you were the one who bought the Save the Kangaroo voucher, and people will carry on thinking you’re just as boring as they always thought.

After the office empties on Thursday evening, THE LIST will no doubt re-surface. There’ll be a figure huddled in a dark corner, frantically muttering to themselves and making cross marks alongside every second name:

“Only £4.99 in Poundsaver. Cheapskate. No bonus for you!”

“Buy me a subscription to Out and Proud will you? P45. See how you like that!”

Best to be boring this year I think - safer all round. I’ll just lock the riding crop back in the closet for another year. I hear that Panda charity are doing a special on Help the Galapagos Turtles. Two for a tenner!

It’s been four days since the launch of PageFour v 1.2, and things are looking promising. Downloads are modestly up, but more importantly, feedback has been excellent - I know I’m on the right track.

Over the past six years I’ve worked for two small software companies in the South East of England. Both companies designed and sold their own products; both companies considered themselves leaders in their field. In all those years I never received any indication from clients that the products were anything more than adequate to the job at hand.

Now, this is hardly surprising. If you buy a product and it does what you bought it for, most of us would be content to let it end there. We may tell our friends about it, we will almost certainly carry on using it, but why bother contacting the company?

In the past month I’ve received a handful of emails from users of PageFour telling me how happy they are with it; how it meets their needs and fits their writing requirements so well.

It’s very uplifting to receive emails of this variety, but I think the real message here is not that my product is so good, but that the alternatives out there are so weak.

All the big word processors are designed for business users - not surprising, as this is where the money lives. Much of the writer specific software I’ve looked at is far too rigid and compartmentalized to fit the real needs of more than a handful of users.

PageFour was designed to be flexible. The central element in the design was that the writer decides at all times how to structure and approach their work. It is this flexibility, more than anything else, that people seem to like.

There was a very interesting article on Hard Work on sfgate.com way back in July. I have a habit of copying any slightly alternative pieces I stumble across on my browsing journeys, and re-visiting them later.

Anyway, the gist of the article was that this belief that hard work is all there is - that working flat out at your nine to five is what you should be doing with your life - is no more than a crazy myth born out of the American Puritan work ethos.

Now I’m not American - I’m an Irishman living in London. But even on this side of the Atlantic, working hard for 40 years for company after company is seen as the rational, responsible, expected course.

Why would anyone want to live like this?

My corporate journey began just over 6 years ago, and it took only four of those years for me to begin pulling my hair out.

Sit still for a moment, and think ahead twenty years. Yes, there will be flying cars, and yes, you will probably be able to download your brain into a computer and live forever; but where will you really be? Will you be in a position to look back on the previous twenty years and say: “Wow, what a life!”

Why should we work all those years for some nameless faceless corporation? Why is it important to abandon our dreams so that we can afford the larger mortgage and the second car? Because make no mistake - that is what so many of us are doing. We’re giving up our dreams for a second car.

I read a piece on a stranger’s blog the other day, where she described how after losing her boring temp job, she went out and fulfilled a dream by busking on the New York subway. Now there’s something you can look back on in twenty years and say: “What a life!”

So that’s what I’m doing - not busking, simply saying that the nine to five is no longer good enough, and that I really don’t want a second car. Or a first car for that matter - anyone like to buy an eight year old Ford Fiesta? Never failed an MOT!

I want to design my own things, and build my own things. And I’ve already started.

I want to look back in twenty years and say …

It’s make or break time for PageFour. Version 1.2 went live at half past midnight.

One of the prevailing opinions in software development circles is to release early and release often. By doing this, you develop your product in line with your customers. Features being added to the next release should always be features existing users have asked for, or potential users have queried before deciding not to buy.

Releasing against a six monthly or even worse, a yearly development plan is catastrophic. The software market, and the IT industry in general changes too fast for such long term plans. And one year is a very, very, long time.

Small software companies have one huge advantage over the giants, and that is their ability to do things quickly. For Microsoft to release a new version of MS Word is probably a two year undertaking - for a company of one or two programmers, two or three months is not unrealistic.

I’ve been following this maxim with PageFour since day one. Version 1 was released on October 8th this year. The world did not shake, but the feedback and suggestions were inspiring. Two months later and I’m feeling very confident about the new release.

The only question now is: will the world shake? And if not, can I make it shake?

The Mini Cooper is a great looking car. I want one. A yellow one, with a black top. I don’t care about the engine. I don’t care about how advanced the brake system is. If I never had to lift the bonnet my happiness would be complete.

Most people who buy cars buy what they see on the outside. And why not? New cars don’t break down anymore - at least we don’t expect them to. So why should any of us be interested in what’s going on under the bonnet? If it looks cool, drives smoothly, and has really neat stuff on the dashboard, then it’s perfect.

Car makers have realised this, which is why the Mini Cooper is such a hot car. When are software designers going to get a clue?

Are we really interested in how slick the database structure is? Does it matter to anyone using a software product if the code base is fully modular and object oriented? And why are the dialogs all so grey and drab? - the Soviet Union lost the cold war. All that functional, boring, dullness is old hat now.

This is not dumbing down! We all like pretty things. Given the choice between pretty things that work well, and ugly things that seem to work no better, we want the pretty things. The designers of ugly things may try to convince us that their product is superior because of all the new technologies gone into the database, or the team of developers drafted in from NASA who built the engine, but the bottom line is: it’s still ugly.

Many of us spend hours every day sitting in front of the same computer, working with the same software packages. It may be a CRM system, a database or spreadsheet, or a simple word processor. Wouldn’t it be really great if these software systems looked and behaved as good on the outside as they claim to do on the inside?

Give us pretty icons, a clutter free workspace, an intuitive working environment, and please - stop blaming us when things go wrong! To use a tired old phrase commonly used in every context except this one by software designers: ‘It ain’t rocket science.’ Not even if your developers used to work for NASA.

My primary aim when designing PageFour was to make an attractive word processor that worked well. I wanted it to look cool, drive smoothly, and have really neat stuff on the dashboard. With version 1.2 only days away, I’m coming closer to achieving this.