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.

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.

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.

Let’s say you have a brilliant idea. You absolutely love it, think it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, and are firmly convinced that it will revolutionise the way people think about XYZ - not to mention the fortune it is sure to make you. But before you spend any time doing in depth market research - or simply bypass this critical step and start designing - you decide to run your idea past a few other people.

Now, this is the smart thing to do - all the books say so!

Just how valid are the responses you get? When I was starting work on version one of PageFour, I ran the idea past a number of people - some I’d known for a long time, some I’d never met or even spoke to, and some were anonymous fonts of ‘free’ advice on internet discussion boards.

The responses I received fell into three categories:

“That’s a fantastic idea. Go for it! Life is short.”

Of all the feedback I received, 95% fell into categories one or two, with a roughly even split between them.

“A fantastic idea”

Sitting back and listening to the carpe diem crowd can be uplifting for about five minutes. You feel vindicated, energised and convinced that you’ve really got something here. Then you start to wonder. The guy sitting opposite you, spewing forth on the joys he had starting his first company twenty years ago, wishing he were young again, is the same guy who ran his own company into the ground by jumping on every band-wagon that passed him by, and by accepting every new idea presented to him by a suit with an MBA as if it were the holy grail. Channel partners anyone?

Just how valid is “That’s a fantastic idea,” as a solid assessment of a business plan?

“Rubbish”

Now, negative feedback can be really constructive. You have the opportunity to hear from people with all sorts of experience on what may be wrong with your product or idea, what pitfalls lie before you, how company B tried the same thing only to discover that the market really wanted something else. But so much of this criticism comes in the form of aggressive slap-downs, rather than anything you can really use. You can just picture the same people who respond to you in this way moving on to flame and troll their way across the internet, happy in their anonymity, free to wallow in their own uninspiring tired lives.

The third response is the only one that matters. It doesn’t matter how many people think your idea is fantastic, or how many people think it’s the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard. These are probably the same people who were sure the dot com bubble would never burst, or that this whole internet thing was just a fad anyway.

“Sit at my feet”

In the early stages, every idea has a hundred and one things wrong with it. A second or third version of a product may have nothing in common with the original idea apart from the name, and sometimes not even that. Real, honest, constructive criticism should help you identify some of these areas; should help you to move from your initial idea to something that might resemble a product, or at the very least help you identify the areas that may cause problems as you move forward.

If you are lucky enough to find someone who offers you this kind of advice, get down on your knees and worship them. Beg to be their apprentice. Call them Yoda if you have to, but listen to every word they say.