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.