PageFour has received its second five star review on Download.com, which is very welcome. I’m always slightly scared that someone will hate the product and post a terrible review, but it hasn’t happened yet, so fingers crossed. Reviews by users have a big impact on the number of downloads - I often use them myself as a guide to whether something is worth trying out or not.
What PC have also reviewed the product and awarded it five stars. When it comes to the multitude of smaller download sites, I’ve always taken the reviews and awards with a pinch of salt, as they tend to award every submission the same high mark. They appear to be designed to keep the developers of the product happy rather than guiding the potential user. What PC seems to be a little different as it awards a good proportion of low marks, so I’ll take it as a compliment.
The new printing options in PageFour have finally been put to rest - for the time being at least. Version 1.42 is now available for download, and I’m more than happy with how it’s turned out.
This version makes the construction of the print templates simpler and easier to understand, and adds a new feature for anyone with multiple printers or print devices such as PDF writers.
Feedback, as always, is more than welcome.
The current release of PageFour is a week old today, and it’s been a good week. The number of downloads are higher than for any previous release, and there have even been a few sales, which is always a good sign. But there is a problem.
The new printing features, which are the centre piece of this release, may not be advanced enough for some users. Throughout the design of PageFour, I’ve tried to keep everything as simple as possible. For many users, having too many choices is worse than no choice at all, and this is why the print templates feature was given a limited number of options, rather than a more comprehensive format.
When designing the print templates, the idea was to allow documents, or folders of documents to be printed in a different format to that used when writing. The aim was to make printing in manuscript form a simple, one click process, and this has almost been achieved. The template structure allows for different font, paragraph, and line spacing settings to be selected, as well as header and page numbering options. It would then be simply a case of choosing which template to use when printing.
The grey area lies in the header and footer construction, where PageFour allows only a selection of options, rather than a full free text field. You can construct a header with chapter name, custom text, and various page number formats through simple selection from the available options, but for more advanced users, this may not be enough.
It’s the old argument of complexity versus simplicity. Do you satisfy ninety five percent of your users, and make the product as perfect as possible for them? or do you aim to please the five percent who want and need more advanced features, while at the same time making the product as a whole more complex. Logic would suggest you please the ninety five percent, but it tends to be the smaller five percent who are the most vocal about your product. To steal a phrase from Malcolm Gladwell, these five percent are the ‘early adopters,‘ the people who try out new things, and if they like them, recommend them to their friends.
The introduction of macros into the header construction would give the advanced users everything they want, but I’m loathe to do it. I’ve always seen macros, or any from of scripting construct as weak design. If you can’t see something visually most non technical users won’t touch it.
A new version of PageFour will be released next week. It won’t have macros - yet - but it will have some changes to the header and footer constructs. Though adding little in the way of new functionality, the changes will make header construction far more intuitive, and who knows - it may just be enough to please those early adopters.
If not, I can always macro later.
If you have even a passing interest in marketing yourself or your product on the internet, you need to know who Seth Godin is, and you need to understand his message.
A good introduction can be found in a speech he gave at Google last month titled ‘All Marketers are Liars.’ It’s a forty minute video and well worth watching.
Should the speech hold your attention, consider following it up with his many published books, blog, and latest online venture Squidoo.
The new version of PageFour was released yesterday, a day ahead of schedule - unless you live in Australia, in which case it was on time. All the download sites have been notified, existing users emailed, and the website updated with the changes necessary to push the new features (sorry, benefits).
It’s a nerve wracking time. Even though the testing has been comprehensive, and I’m one hundred per cent sure there are no fatal bugs just waiting to bite me in the ass, it’s hard not to wonder if something has been missed. With twenty downloads since yesterday afternoon, and no screams for help - things are looking good.
Releasing a new version is a fifteen step process, and all of those steps involve the actions of a human being - me. I was going to list each step here, but I got bored before I reached number seven, so I’ll spare you the pain. The only point to make is that something always gets left out.
But that’s negative thinking, and all the self help books I’ve never read say … something negative about negative thinking. Everything will run smoothly, people will love the new features, and there will be no bugs.
If I say it often enough, it will happen. Right?
