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.

It’s five thirty in the morning and I’m on my knees looking for a Renée Fleming CD I bought eight years ago. It reminds me of strawberry fields in July, and a battered old Austen Metro I paid two hundred and seventy five pounds for. I spent that summer picking fruit for a living in the Kent countryside, sleeping in a fallen down cottage, and listening to beautiful music. I haven’t heard it in a long time.

A couple of years earlier, in a tiny shack in Tasmania Johnny Cash was singing about a Ring of Fire - first thing in the morning as the eggs were frying. There was myself, Daniel, and Rosco. We’d met in the peach fields of Victoria, and followed the fruit south to the Huon Valley in Tasmania, where we were shacking up on a small farm run by a crazy half blind man called Ted. The highlight of our time there was finding a second hand stereo and a plastic bag full of ripped off cassette tapes by Johnny and Neil Young at the local charity shop. It cost us thirty dollars and I can’t listen to Johnny Cash today without hearing those eggs frying.

About five years back I turned away from the music I loved, and the books I read began to change. I followed the well trodden path, and took the high paying jobs with career prospects. For reasons I can’t remember it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. There was financial security, flats with real kitchens, and cars that didn’t make loud clanking noises and belch strange coloured smoke whenever I drove anywhere. But the music just didn’t sound the same anymore. The day job started to seem important, and that was never part of the plan. It was supposed to be a bank roll, nothing more; a steady stream of cash as I played The Man at his own game, and lived a real life on the proceeds.

So eight months ago I made the break, went part time at the day job and started trying to find the music again. I’d given myself a couple of projects to get me going; projects that should have led me down the right paths. But I hadn’t shaken off The Man completely, and the reasons I turned away from the daily grind began to blur. I got caught up in the whole starting a business thing, the making of money and the striving for success. There was no music.

Looking over the posts on this blog, it all feels just a little artificial and conservative; as if I’m carefully writing what I feel other people might want to read - ever cautious not to offend. Yesterday evening I began reading The End of Faith, a book on religion, fundamentalism, and the future of reason. I remember thinking I’d love to talk about it on my blog, recommend it to people, but of course I couldn’t and wouldn’t because the position the author takes on religion is so derisive it would be far too controversial.

When did I become a wimp?

Back when I listened to Johnny Cash over fried eggs, I wouldn’t have dreamed of playing it safe, or cared who I might have pissed off over a misplaced or well placed word. We lose ourselves so easily, forget who we were and the music we loved. Some people call it settling down, being responsible, but it’s not. It’s giving up.

A few weeks ago, I dug out all those old CDs, and I have to tell you - Renée is sounding really good after all these years.

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.

Do we really need another MP3 converter? Or another Windows registry cleaner? What about a new time management program that’s just like all the other time management programs only with one extra feature?

When it comes to developing new software, originality is in short supply. So many companies seem to take the safe route and build a product that has been built before. They convince themselves that their product is going to be different, and that their interpretation is so much better than the competitions. The field they choose to work in is almost always flooded with more established versions of their new product. PageFour, my first project, falls into this category.

So who are we designing software for? Or more importantly, who are we not designing software for? A quick search on Google throws up the following:

Why is no one designing software for undertakers? They’re a business just like any other. Well, maybe not just like any other - but they keep records, make sales, and have a product range and stock to manage. They must be keeping tabs on all those different coloured coffins and bottles of formaldehyde somewhere.

It’s not only undertakers who are suffering from a lack of quality software to help them do their jobs. Software for nuns returns only two results, one of which is a link to a porn site. Pet shops, preachers, magicians… all suffer from a similar lack of attention.

Why are new software startups not taking advantage of this gap in the market? Granted, sourcing the product requirements may involve some hanging out in morgues and cemeteries, but surely a shot at becoming a market leader in an area that is guaranteed never to run short of business more than makes up for working in a socially embarrassing field.

So here’s a call to all you morticians, pet shop owners, preachers and magicians out there. How happy are you with your current software solutions? Are they drab, grey and barely functional? Do you dream of better days to come, when software with pretty icons will be designed just for you?

This is more than idle curiosity. I’m researching new product ideas, and would genuinely like to hear from anyone working in slightly unusual fields where dedicated software solutions are in short supply. if this sounds like you, and we’ll talk.

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?

Just how anonymous are we as we surf our way around the internet? We’d all like to think that where we go nobody knows; that despite all the scare stories, Big Brother really isn’t watching us. But other people could be.

At three minutes past six yesterday evening, someone typed into a Google search box. My name is unique enough that the first page of links pretty much all refer to me. From here, they selected the fourth link on the page, which brought them to this blog. Apart from a side trip to the PageFour web-site (full details on request), they stayed for fifteen minutes.

Now, this doesn’t tell me very much, apart from the fact that someone who knows me has stumbled across my blog. But there’s more. Every time you visit a web-site you leave a trail. Details of every page you visited, every image you looked at, and every file you downloaded, are available to anyone with access to the site logs. More importantly, you leave a calling card - your IP address. This IP address can then be traced back to a domain name using the WHOIS database.

So who was yesterday evening’s visitor?

It was someone from the day job. The IP address was easily tracked back to the company domain name. The time was three minutes past six, at which point only a couple of people would have been left in the office. And I know who they were.

Good thing I kept all those strong opinions about the company to myself. But since I’ve got your attention - the quality of the coffee leaves a lot to be desired.

The message here, is that what we do and where we go on the internet is not as anonymous as we’d like to think. The trail is out there. Sure, Big Brother may not be watching that closely today, but that doesn’t mean he won’t start taking a closer look tomorrow.