The first batch of PageFour reviews have been added to the new Reviews and Testimonials page. Each review is either quoted in full, or contains a link to the complete review hosted on another web-site or blog. In all cases, the reviewer is either named, or a link provided back to their blog.

Hopefully, these reviews will help those who are not familiar with PageFour to decide whether to download or not. No anonymous comments or reviews have been used - ‘Steve form London‘ for example - as my feeling is that these sorts of comments, with no way to verify them or identify the person behind them, add nothing and only serve to cast doubt on the authenticity of all comments.

More reviews will be added over time, so if anyone would like to post comments or opinions about PageFour, please contact me.

Over the past year, there have been a number of enquiries about the possibility of a Mac version of PageFour. My response has always been that the probability of releasing a version for the Mac is very low. I’m a Windows developer, and have been for many years. Despite having a lot of respect for the Mac software community, I have never been tempted to join. My training and working life have been focused primarily on Big Business software - an area that tends to impinge little on Mac users.

Every time someone queries me on the Mac, I point them to Scrivener, a neat piece of software, written - like PageFour - for creative writers. For many months, Scrivener was available as a free beta, as the product was still undergoing development, but version 1.01 of the completed version has just been released.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Mac user, as it does share some features with PageFour (the use of Snapshots being the most obvious). You can download it here, or check out the authors blog here.

Compliments of the Snarky one:

Some Basic Guidelines on Writing Well

Well, it made me laugh.

I backtracked a PageFour referral yesterday to a site called Literature and Latte, home of a new Mac tool for writers named Scrivener. The designer acknowledges PageFour’s influence on one of the key features of the product, citing the Snapshots as inspiration for their implementation of versioning. I’m flattered that my humble offering is having such far reaching influence, but in all fairness I can claim credit only for trying out a few non-standard ideas borrowed from elsewhere.

A little over a year ago I read a book called About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design, written by Alan Cooper. It was the thoughts and ideas presented in this book that formed the basis of PageFour’s more unique features. The author questioned much of the established wisdom or ‘way of doing things‘ in User Interface design, using MS Word as a primary example of how not to do things. He demonstrated how many of the features common across software are common not because they are intuitive or even useful approaches, but because they were first implemented at a time when meeting the hardware requirements was more important than satisfying users. Today, with hard drives and memory doubling in size every eighteen months, hardware limitations are almost a thing of the past. Yet despite this, user interfaces still carry the burden of design weaknesses from a bygone era, and many of us have come to accept these flaws as the correct way of doing things.

When you put a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter and start typing, the words appear on the page as you work. You don’t have to make a decision ten or twenty minutes later to either keep what you wrote or clear the page. You’ve spent a lot of time thinking carefully about which words to use and how to string them together, so of course you want to hold onto them. Yet this is exactly the sort of decision that software like MS Word expects you to make every day. You type into a blank document, the words appear in front of you, and after you’ve finished your work, you’re asked if you want to ‘Save‘ it. You’re basically asked if you really meant it or were you just playing around for the past twenty minutes?

Software works this way because hardware works this way.

A blank document in a word processor is not the same as a sheet of paper. When you type into MS Word, your work is stored temporarily in one type of memory. When you ‘Save‘ your work (which of course you want to do, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered to begin with), it’s stored a second time in a more permanent type of memory. This is the ONLY reason software asks you if you want to save your work, and it only asks you because once upon a time memory was scarce and very, very expensive, and if there was even the slightest chance that you really were just playing around, it wouldn’t have to use up that little bit of permanent memory.

And because software worked this way once (out of a kind of necessity), it still works this way today.

Users are expected to understand how the hardware and Operating Systems of their computers work in order to use even the most basic software. They are expected to know what files are, how folders can exist within folders, and why they need to ‘Save‘ their work even though they can see it right there on the screen in front of them. Most people who use software should not need to know any of this - that’s what software is designed for, to control how the user interacts with the rest of their computer and act as a buffer between them and the hardware. Properly designed software is supposed to handle all this for you.

Many of the core elements of PageFour came from ideas presented in the chapters of Alan Cooper’s book, in particular the ‘concealing‘ of files from the user, the quick Snapshot feature to replace the over- and often mis- used ‘Save As‘ option in MS Word, the naming conventions of Pages and Notebooks, the automatic saving of all changes, and the interactive archiving.

These ideas are not my own, I simply tried out different ways of doing things suggested by other people, and in doing so attempted to dump the baggage of decades of ill thought out interface design at the door. The guys over at Literature and Latte are more than welcome to copy or adapt features from PageFour, just as I’ve copied and adapted ideas from Alan Cooper, and hopefully they won’t stop there. Just because things have been done one way for decades, does not mean there are not better ways.

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.

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.

My TV remote has twenty nine buttons I’ve never used; the VCR has thirty; the DVD player twenty six. And before you ask - yes I really did count them all.

There’s a name for this kind of excess: it’s called featuritis, and it pops up in all sorts of design failures. I stumbled across an interesting article on The Featuritis Curve the other day that goes a long way to explaining why we have to endure this.

Good designs are obvious. When aesthetic and functional beauty combine, the result is not just pleasing to the eye, but a pleasure to use. This is why the iPod is so popular. Chances are it’s not the best value for money - there are probably other music players that produce a better sound, have a longer battery life, or have a whole raft of additional features - but the iPod looks like a work of art and is simple and straight forward to use

When have you ever heard someone boast that they couldn’t program their iPod?

So who should we be designing for anyway? The 98% who use a small number of features all the time, or the 2% who use advanced features once a week? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot simpler if my TV remote had a single advanced button that opened a menu for all those quirky, unused features?

Make no mistake here - you’ve never used those mysterious buttons either, and you probably don’t know anyone who has.

Software is often designed in the same way, for the same 2% of users. Feature after feature is added, each just as prominent as the one before, with little thought given to the complexity this adds to the product as a whole.

At the nine to five over the past few weeks, we’ve been putting the finishing touches to a new product aimed at the business market. It’s the sum of eighteen months work for four programmers - plenty of time and resources to produce a first class piece of work. But it’s not first class. Dialog after dialog contains features, options, and checkboxes that no one really understands. The poor unfortunate writing the help file has to suffer every time he asks for an explanation of feature X. In some cases, even the person who designed the feature can’t explain it without re-reading his own code, and even then the explanation can be patchy.

This isn’t funny, it’s critical. Complexity like this is nothing to be proud of. But why does it happen?

You can chant ‘keep it simple‘ until you’re blue in the face, and everyone around you will nod their head in agreement. The problem is, we all have a different perception of what simple means. Programmers are geeks; they belong to the 2% who use all those weird buttons on the TV remote, and for many of them these features are absolutely essential. The sales and marketing types want to be able to say that their product is better than the competition because it can also be used to fry an egg, or do your kid’s homework. But that does not make it better.

Features are not important, it’s the product as a whole that matters. Does it do what it was designed to do, and does it do it fantastically well? Does it look good, run smoothly, and behave intuitively? If it doesn’t, then all the features in the world will not save you.

More features does not equal more sales. More features does not make for happier customers. More features will not make your product better than the competition.

PageFour has reached the stage where featuritis first raises its head. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been putting together a future development plan, and my focus throughout has been on identifying those mysterious buttons that so few of us ever use. Only time will tell if I’ve succeeded.

With the release of version 1.29 of PageFour, complete with one change to a single line of code, the crackers have returned.

My personal opinion of the people downloading my software from these illegal sites is that they’re one candle shy of a decent birthday cake. If I were giving the product away for free, they probably wouldn’t touch it. After all, freeware is just so common! As soon as they realise they can steal something other people pay for, and do so from a shady web-site with Mandarin text, PageFour suddenly becomes hot property.

I can just picture the emails flying to one dank bedroom after another. “Check this out. You can use it for that novel you always wanted to write about life in a twelfth century Cistercian monastery!”

Get a life guys!

Still, some of these sites have a halfway decent pagerank, so the links do perform one useful service.

If you could choose your name, would you choose the one you were given?

I have a grey haired aunt I’ve been calling Sheila all my life. Yesterday I discovered her name is actually Julia. Now, strange as this may seem, it’s not all that unusual for the women in my mother’s family. Jenny is really Jane, Lily was born Margaret, Nancy is Anne, and Joan was once Josephine.

So what’s in a name anyway?

Sure, Josephine has that whole Napoleonic thing going for it, but does it really compare to Ingrid Bergman in a shiny suit of armour? Margaret may have the feel of a grand Faustian drama, but I’m betting Lily the drag queen has much more fun.

Why don’t more of us choose our own name? We choose our friends; we choose our lovers; we choose the clothes we wear; we pretty much choose the lives we live; but till the day we die, most of us carry the name we were given years ago.

I scratched my head for days trying to come up with a name for PageFour.

Naming a child is easy - there are a finite number of names to choose from. Unless you’re a rock star or a football player, in which case naming your poor unfortunate after a New York suburb is quite acceptable. But how do you pick a name for a piece of software?

You could name it for what it does. But the software world is riddled with products of suspect quality called Word, Journal something or other, and Novel whatever. You could name it Fred, but that’s even stranger than naming your child Brooklyn.

Or maybe not. Fred does have a certain gritty charm; and let’s face it, we all know someone called Fred. I could make a killing every Christmas. ‘Fred - Novel Writing Software‘ could become the new pair of socks for aspiring writers the world over whose parents called them Fred.

I chose a practical name that sounded neat. PageOne was already taken by cheap bookshops on every high street in the country. PageTwo sounded just a little like settling for second best. PageThree? Well, like many an Irish person, I often have trouble with those ‘th’s,’ so that was never going to work. PageFour was the one for me.

Four is a strong, respectable number - clearly much better than three, but at the same time not as pretentious as five. I can live with PageFour.

Now, time to turn my attention to Darren.

Paul Graham, in his book Hackers and Painters, wrote:

To make something good, you have to be thinking, “wow, this is really great,” not “what a piece of shit; these fools will love it.”

Many years ago, my day job consisted of working on a piece of software for the business market that I considered to be a piece of shit. Now, this is not the best opinion to have of the product you spend forty hours a week working on, and it would be true to say that holding that view did not help me add anything really great to the design of the product.

To design well, you must passionately believe that what you are working on is really great, and that even if it never sells a million copies, or even a single one, it is still really great.

Four months ago I went part time at my current nine to five to work on my own ideas. PageFour began life as a personal project, born out of my own frustrations with MS Word. I wanted to design a word processor that placed the emphasis on words; a word processor that made life easier for creative writers; a word processor without a single piece of business oriented functionality. I wanted to design a word processor for the way I worked.

I’m writing this in PageFour now, and I think it’s really great.

Since I began working in earnest on something I felt passionate about, my working day has gotten easier, my designs are better, and the new ideas that have been absent for the past year have started to flow again. I have a list of projects I can’t wait to start work on next year, and every one of them has the makings of a great project.