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.