The way we go about our day to day activities has changed considerably over the past ten years. So when was the last time you

1. Bought a newspaper.
Five years ago, before I discovered that all the good stuff from the Guardian and the New York Times was available online, not to mention newspapers and magazines I’d never heard of.

2. Paid £3.99 for a DVD at the local video rental shop.
Eighteen months ago, before I found Amazon DVD rentals. £6.99 a month, 4 DVDs, and no late return charges.

3. Ate a Big Mac.
Three years ago, a few days before I first read Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

4. Paid close to full price for a bestselling novel.
Three years ago, at which point I learned to trust Amazon’s amatuer resellers, and every bestseller became available for £0.01 + postage, a few weeks after it was published.

5. Took a dictionary or thesaurus off the bookshelf.
Was it three, or was it four years ago? About the time I found dictionary.com. Not exactly the Oxford English Dictionary, but good enough that walking to the bookcase became too much of a chore.

6. Had a problem when making a purchase because of a language barrier.
Two years ago, after which I discovered I could happily use Amazon in Germany to buy those Babylon 5 DVDs before they were released in the UK, with a little help from an online German to English translator.

7. Bought a CD in a music shop.
Four years ago. It was coming up to Christmas, I was short a present or two, and Amazon’s cut off date for Christmas delivery had passed.

8. Bought a cheap plane ticket from a budget airline, or used a cheap alternative like lastminute.com.
One year ago, before I discovered that buying direct online from British Midland and Avis was actually cheaper than using the budget alternatives.

9. Decided to wait for the DVD box set because buying all six individual DVDs cost twice as much.
Eighteen months ago, before I realised I could buy each Stargate DVD as it was released, and sell it on ebay a week later for the same price, plus postage.

10. Spent more than ten minutes in a supermarket.
Three months ago, at which point Tesco’s online food shop really did start delivering the goods.

If J.K. Rowling is writing true to form, the final Harry Potter book should hit the shelves in a little over a year. But what if she’s suffering from a severe case of writers block? What if the words just will not come, and she’s down to a page every three weeks? Her core fan base could find themselves married with 2.4 kids before a drastically abridged 110 page novelette lands in the bookstores in 2015.

It could happen. Think of all the poor traumatized fans out there, not to mention the children who also read her work, all clinging to the belief that this year they’ll finally get their Hogwarts fix. Wouldn’t it be great if we knew how she was really doing - straight from the horses mouth?

Now, I can take or leave Harry Potter. Like many of us, I’d kind of like to see what happens at the end, but I don’t lose any sleep over it. We all know the good guys will win and the bad guys will lose. The only real question is: Which of the good guys will go out in a blaze of glory alongside Moldywarts?

Anita Blake is another story entirely. If I had a first born, I’d sacrifice the little mongrel for the next volume in the series. After all, the world is seriously over populated, and kids are two a penny. The same cannot be said for quality literature about vampires, werewolves, and necromancers. When it comes to the strange and unusual world of vampire fiction, Laurell K. Hamilton truly is Queen of the Damned.

She had a bad day yesterday, failing to produce a single page, but Wednesday and Thursday combined made up for it with a staggering output of 28 pages. She’s about 2 days away from completing her next Merry Gentry novel, and the question in all our minds is: Can she get it done by Monday? Her promotional tour for the thirteenth Anita Blake novel kicks off on Monday, so it’s all hands on deck to knock out those final pages before she hits the road.

 We know all this, because she tells us. Her blog gives almost daily progress reports on everything she’s doing. Granted, the web-site will win no awards for artistic beauty, and the many pictures of her dogs … well, they’re just pictures of dogs.Compare the slickness of J.K. Rowling’s official web-site, with the blogger next door look favoured by Laurell K. Hamilton. Rowling’s is an over engineered, impossible to navigate, directionless piece of drivel, obviously created by a web design company too caught up in the fame of their client to produce a normal, usable web-site. And do we get to see a picture of her dog? Not a chance.

Laurell K. Hamilton’s blog, for all its amatuer design, tells us all a die hard fan wants to know - how that next book is really coming along.

Fingers crossed ’till Monday. Get that book finished.

The beta version of PageFour 1.4 has just been released.

Development over the past few weeks has gone very well, and I’m more than happy with the result. Every time I make a major change or addition to PageFour I start wondering how I possibly managed without it, and the new printing options are no exception.

The Print Templates add yet another unique feature and key selling point to the product, which alongside the Snapshot and Archiving features make PageFour stand out from its competitors. Now all I have to do is capitalise on this uniqueness and turn it into downloads and sales.

Ain’t life grand.

Work is almost complete on the next version of PageFour. This release will see major improvements to the printing capabilities of the product, focusing as always on the needs of writers, rather than business users.

Building on feedback over the past few months, the basic printing options of version 1.3 have been drastically overhauled. Changes include:

1. Full control over headers, footers, and page numbers when printing.
2. Facility to ‘override‘ font, paragraph, and line spacing settings.
3. Feature whereby the user can create multiple print templates, and choose which one to use when printing.

Lack of control over headers and footers has always been a weakness of PageFour, so I’m very pleased that this is about to be resolved. The key feature of the coming release however, is the ability to print using different font and paragraph settings to those you use when writing.

I work on a high resolution monitor, and use Verdana 11 as my default font, with single line spacing. The changes in version 1.4 will allow me to continue using these settings, yet print using Times New Roman 12, with one and a half line spacing. Different publishers have different requirements, and the font or paragraph settings you use when writing may be completely different to those you would use when printing a manuscript. In the past, you may have had to change these settings within the document each time before printing. With version 1.4 of PageFour, it’s simply a case of setting up however many print templates you may need, and choosing which one to use when printing.

If all goes to plan, a beta version should be available for download and testing this weekend, with the release version following a week later. If anyone is interested in trying out the beta version, please and I’ll point you in the right direction. Previous beta testers have had a major impact on the shape of the product, so it’s a good opportunity to have a say in how PageFour develops.

Programmers don’t like users. In an ideal world, whatever product they are designing would be beautifully written with the latest trendy technology, passed on to a testing department (preferably in a different city), and never sold to a single user. It would work like a charm when configured correctly through hacking various text and script files in Notepad, produce in depth exception reports for every problem encountered, and have a beautifully crafted and fully modular framework of code that can be reused in every future conceivable product - whether a flight simulator for NASA or a stock inventory for Jerry’s Fish and Chip Shop.

The problem with users is that they tend to get this crazy idea that what they see on the screen actually is the product. They seem to think that the hastily thrown together heap of grey dialogs and tacky icons sourced from a free download site is what they’ve paid all that money for.

They’d be right.

Software is designed to be used, which means it’s designed for users to use. Note the emphasis on the word use here. When someone pays you money for a piece of software, they don’t care how the underlying code base has been constructed, and they don’t care about the structure of the database. All that matters is: Can I use it to do the job, or will it cause me grief?

Every programmer pays lip service these days to the importance of user interfaces, but in most cases they don’t really believe it. Like an alcoholic who tells you about his drink problem, they say the words because they are the words people expect to hear, but deep down they still believe that they control the drink, it does not control them, and the GUI really isn’t as important as the engine running underneath.

For too many programmers the GUI is the bit bolted on at the last minute to satisfy users and the guys in sales. It is often designed by someone who thinks typing configuration commands into a text file is far more useful than an interactive GUI with trees and checkboxes; that a visual interface can never allow the flexibility and customisation of a simple configuration file. This is all true - if the sole user of the product is the guy who wrote it!

If you don’t think about the user from day one, you will never design a truly great product; you will never design a product people want to use. Even the giants make this mistake. I stumbled across an article the other day on the failings of Lotus Notes, one of IBMs big groupware products everyone was talking about ten years ago. To quote one of the many disgruntled users:

“Notes’s backend functionality has no bearing on us 100m or so end-users. As far as we are concerned the GUI is the system. And boyo… is the GUI client a heap of ill-conceived, non-intuitive rubbish.”

Lotus Notes now has the dubious honour of its very own hate site where its many failings and embarrassments are displayed and dissected for all the world to see.

There’s a lot more competition out there today than there was ten or twenty years ago. If you build a technological marvel and ship it with a shabby user interface, and the competition builds a functional product that looks fantastic, who do you think will win the sale?

They say that if you give something away for free today, you can’t charge for it tomorrow - that you create an expectation that it will always be free. I’m not so sure of this.

About five years ago I began reading the New York Times online. After 9/11, I quickly become immersed in the opinions of Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and their fellow opinion makers. Love them or hate them, they seemed at the time to be the sole voices of dissent in a crazy world. When TimesSelect was introduced a few months ago, and my access to free content was free no more, I grumbled like so many others - but I took out my credit card and paid the money.

I was a junkie. I’d become dependent on ‘the reality-based community,‘ and I couldn’t give it up.

David Webber is a best selling science fiction author. His books about Honor Harrington are often described as Horatio Hornblower in space, and each new volume is an immediate best seller. I discovered him about a year ago after following a link to the Baen Free Library, from where ten of his novels are available to read or download for free.

I began by reading On Basilisk Station, the first volume in the Honor Harrington series. It was a fantastic read, and I wanted more. The problem was, of the seven or eight books in the series, only two were downloadable for free. So I turned to Amazon, and without grumbling this time, paid the money.I’d gotten hooked, and I wanted more.

Kelley Armstrong is another best selling author who treats her fans to freebies with no expectation of future revenues. After buying her first novel, I turned to her web-site to discover three prequel novels set in the same universe, about the same characters. These novels were unedited, but complete works, never published and not available to purchase.

After quickly devouring the free content, I again turned to Amazon and bought the next paperback in the series.

So what is there to learn from all this?

My opinion is that it comes down to how valuable non-paying subscribers or users are. If the product or service you provide is always free, with no prospect of revenue, then you gain nothing by having a thousand or a million users. Both David Weber and Kelley Armstrong however, are building a larger fan base by providing free downloads, and enhancing sales of their other books as a result.

When I released PageFour I knew there was a good chance it would not be a commercially viable product, but I wanted to write it anyway. Over the past few months, referrals from dodgy warez sites, hawking the illegal cracked version of the software have been ten times higher than all other referrals combined.

So, would it be better to have ten thousand people using PageFour for free, or five hundred fully paid and licensed users? I’m honest enough to admit that the thought of ten or a hundred thousand people using and enjoying my software is a huge ego trip, but that doesn’t pay the rent.

So yesterday I got a mention on Seth Godin’s blog, and the guy goes and spells my name wrong. How hard is it to spell Darren anyway?

I should point out that though I did bring the Technorati link to his attention, the choice of the Heidi Klum article was his not mine - an obvious attempt to shirk responsibility for dodgy content. I was reading something far more intellectually stimulating - honest.

It’s an interesting link I came across on the English language version of the Der Spiegel web-site. Pick an article and scroll to the bottom of the page. There’s a Technorati link to Blogs discussing this story, which opens the main Technorati links page, displaying every blog with a link back to the article in question.

For a major news site to link to external blogs in this way is new. Many news sites have attempted to guide discussion of articles from within their own sites, but none to my knowledge have provided such a clear path to voices and opinions beyond their control.

Now if only the New York Times, Guardian, and all the rest followed suit.