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.

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:

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?

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.