PageFour has been around for a while now, and the user base is growing daily. Every week, I’m contacted by users or potential users who have questions about the product or simply wish to tell me what they think. But one thing that seems to be missing are reports of bugs, unexpected behaviour, or problems.

I could say this is because there are no bugs, but I don’t believe that for a moment. All software has bugs, especially after new releases. A few weeks ago, prior to the release of version 1.60, a bug WAS reported. It was in an obscure part of the software, and only occurred when a page was being saved out of PageFour as plain text. On investigation, it turned out this bug had been there for about a year, and no one had reported it.

The fix took all of 3 minutes.

I’d like to encourage anyone who encounters a problem, firstly not to assume that it is the way the software works, and secondly to drop me an email or use the contact form on the website with details. If something in PageFour is behaving in an unexpected way, or even if the behaviour simply appears unintuitive, chances are it’s a bug, or at the very least, an area that can be improved.

The same goes for new feature requests. These do come in, and in many cases my answer is that such a feature would not suit the product, but they don’t come that often. For example, I implemented the Merge Pages feature of version 1.60 after reviewing a request from only one user, and it seemed to me that it would benefit most, if not all users. I hadn’t thought of it before, because I personally did not see a use for it. After releasing the first beta of the new feature I received a number of emails from users explaining how this was the one thing missing from PageFour, the lack of which caused them all sorts of problems when it came to exporting completed works.

If I’d known this, I probably would have implemented the feature some time ago. So once again, I’d like to encourage anyone who finds important features to be missing to contact me. The more people tell me about something, and the more interest there is in a particular feature, the more likely I am to implement it.

This is not to say that all new features requests will be worked on. I’m still committed to not over burdening PageFour with feature after feature, but where the product as a whole has a shortcoming, then this is an area that should and will be addressed.

Most PageFour users never saw the early versions of the product, and if they had, might not have been too impressed. Version 1 consisted of a single Notebook, no importing of Word or RTF files, a proprietary file format, no print templates or Smart-Edit, and lots of unusual and annoyingly quirky behaviour. Every change since then has been in response to feedback and requests from users, even though that feedback was a long time coming.

So to reiterate what I said earlier: don’t be shy about reporting problems or making suggestions where you feel the product could be improved. The worst that could happen is I’ll say no.