The new release of PageFour has just gone live. Thanks to all the beta testers who caught those last few annoying bugs that always seem to creep in no matter how much pre-beta testing takes place.

The Smart-Edit feature is looking good, and there haven’t been too many disparaging comments - no doubt that will come later - so overall I’m happy with the result. Most of my own testing of the new feature was done using downloaded copies of Jane Austen novels from The Gutenberg Library, and a few other downloads via Kazaa that I have no intention of naming due to questions over copyright, that if I came clean I would have to admit are not really questions at all. All I have to say after looking at the results is that Jane Austen really is a superior writer to many of the cheap and cheerful Sci Fi scribblers currently on the best seller lists, and let’s leave it at that.

I spent about an hour one evening last week over a bottle of wine scanning the results for her crutch words in Pride & Prejudice and Emma, and the best I could come up with was two uses of ‘obtruded’ and an over fondness for the word ‘mortification.’ The contemporary novels I ran the same tests on … well, let’s just say the report card would read something along the lines of: ‘Needs work, must try harder.‘

Anyway, version 1.5 is live, so check it out - all 30 Day trial restrictions have been removed, so there really are no excuses!

The next version of PageFour is complete and ready for testing. Having said that, the release of the beta will have to wait until my new telephone is installed and my internet connection back up and running - next week hopefully.

In each release of PageFour, I’ve tried not to add any extra complexity to the product, preferring to leave out little changes that may benefit small numbers of people, if they make the product as a whole more difficult to understand. I’m a firm believer in the ‘less is more‘ and the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) schools of thought when it comes to software design, and my aim has always been to keep PageFour firmly grounded in simplicity and not get carried away designing features for the sake of it.

Changes and enhancements in the upcoming release include:

1. Smart-Edit. This is a built in tool to scan pages for common phrases and words, and is my first attempt at incorporating editing features into PageFour. I’m still unsure as to the wisdom of even making the attempt, and I’ll expand on the functionality later. All opinions will be more than welcome.
2. Improvements to the Auto-Archiving feature. Having used PageFour for a year now, I’m working with fifteen Notebooks and about a thousand pages. Backing up this number of files is time consuming, so the Auto-Archiving has been changed to allow the user to select which Notebooks should be auto-archived. This does not impact archives made by the user, which will continue to backup all Notebooks.
3. Changes to the word counter. This little change gave me a big headache! Originally, the intention was to have a rolling word count on the status bar, incrementing as you typed, but this proved overly ambitious. Though possible, such a feature would have used far too much memory, turning PageFour into a cripplingly slow application like many Norton products. The solution was to approach the problem similarly to MS Word, with a little dialog sitting on top, out of the way, and easily refreshable when you want a word count update.
4. New feature to allow top level folders and pages to be added from the Notebook list. This is necessary when a Notebook has so many pages and folders that no free space can be found in the tree, preventing new pages from been added directly to the Notebook.
5. Superscript option added to text formatting.

Minor changes include:

1. When importing and rolling back Notebooks or pages, only the relevant Notebooks are automatically backed up before the changes are applied. This makes a big difference when you have a large number of Notebooks and pages.
2. Corrections to scrolling and display problems in the main Notebook tree under certain Operating Systems.
3. Multi select enabled for Notebook roll back.
4. Correction to indentation issues in numbered lists.

As I said earlier, if all goes well with Eircom (yeah, right!) I hope to have a beta version available for download next week, which I’d love people to try out. I’ll be giving a fuller description of the Smart-Edit feature shortly, and again, feedback will be a big help. Even though the work is complete, I’m still of two minds as to whether I should even release it.

Finally, I’m contemplating changes to the way the trial version of the product works, in the hopes that more downloads can be turned into dedicated users and sales. Again, I’ll write more on this closer to the release date.

Last weekend saw another PageFour review on www.download.com, and would you believe it, she got a whopping 5 stars. The download figures may be low, the sales figures lower still, but the feedback from where it really counts is still as positive as ever.

So a special thanks to trystwiththemoon for posting such a favourable impression of PageFour on a public forum. And no, it wasn’t me writing under one of my many aliases. I’d be far too afraid of being found out to pull off something like that, not to mention the negative publicity that would surely follow. But then, they say there’s no such thing as bad publicity…

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.

PageFour is finally listed in the Open Directory.

About three months ago, I spent some time jumping through all the hoops during the submission process. The rewards of a mention are huge, as it is probably the most widely read classified listing out there, but there is no way to influence or speed up the process. Turns out some people really are immune to the persuasion a fast dollar brings.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Open Directory Project, it’s the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It’s managed and policed by volunteers and takes itself as seriously as the other big non-profit sites like Wikipedia. The beauty of the site is the absence of spam and advertisements of any description, and the knowledge that every web-site and product listed has first been checked out by a human being with the power to deny entry.

PageFour is listed under the Writers Resources category and shares a page with a host of other products and services aimed at writers. It may turn out to be the most profitable link yet, introducing the product to new audiences. Referrals have already begun to flow, so I’m crossing my fingers.

It’s been a good couple of months for PageFour - not spectacular by any means, but consistent and improving. There just may be a future for the product yet, so I’m optimistic. But then I’m always optimistic, even when pessimism is the order of the day - never allowing elbow room to those negative thoughts.

Every time a published author buys PageFour I get just a little kick inside. While it’s true that not everyone is a fan of my interpretation of a writing tool, the positive comments far outweigh the negative, and every time I google a new buyer’s name and come up with an Amazon link, I know I’m on the right track.

Over the past two weeks I’ve had three journalists buying the product and one published author. The journalists have surprised me, as PageFour was designed first and foremost for creative writers struggling with that first novel or set of short stories, but it just goes to show, people always find uses for things you never envisaged. What this means of course, is that I’ll need to start looking at the PageFour feature set with journalists in mind.

I knew a guy years ago who began every other sentence with the phrase: “As the man said.” I kept asking him who this man was, because for a stranger nobody had ever met he certainly had a lot to say for himself. Blind advice is easy to come by, but when you actually break down these words of wisdom and ask yourself are they true? the answer is often no.

They say love is blind. They also say you should work on something you’re passionate about. They can’t all be right.

Most software startups fail, and it seems to me they fail because they design the wrong product. They design products they’re passionate about, not products anybody else is passionate about. These one man shops work on pet projects out of love, and often turn their feelings into crazy market projections and dreams of wild commercial success. For over a year now I’ve been hanging out with the multitude of startup owners who frequent the Joel on Software message boards, where everybody offers advice and blunt criticism to their fellow passionate software designers. Most of the readers of this forum are working on failed or failing projects out of love.

Should you be passionate about a commercial product you’ve just started working on?

I don’t believe so. Anyone who’s been in love knows it makes us do crazy things. Our thoughts turn irrational. We make assumptions about the person we love that a sane man would call insane. We make allowances for defects and character failings. The same is true of software design. Passionate programmers assume everyone else will be just as passionate about their product. How could they not love it just as you do? It’s so cool it leaves Microsoft in the shade. It’s sure to be the next big thing, because in your own mind it already is the biggest thing.

Over the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that when designing new software, it’s far better to go for an arranged marriage. Arranged marriages often succeed because the two parties involved are compatible beyond the lingering gaze across a crowded room, because the passion often comes later when the relationship is established and has proven itself. If you fall in love with your wife or husband a year down the road, you know their failings just as well as their strengths. You’re not blinded by passion.

I designed PageFour because I wanted to. Commercial considerations were pushed to one side as I stumbled on in blissful ignorance, convinced that my own love of the product would be reflected in the market as a whole. I made the fatal and all too common mistake of working on something I was passionate about. The response was lukewarm. Feedback was encouraging, but rarely translated into a love to match my own, and only very rarely into sales. No matter how good the product, it’s difficult to compete in a crowded market where many of your competitors are free. The incentive to try something new is simply not there. A more commercially aware mind would have seen this straight away and considered the wisdom of designing yet another word processor, however unique and different some of its features may be.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been researching product number two. Note the use of the word researching. It’s a novel concept for me that has nothing to do with passion and love. I’ve learned my lesson, and it was a lesson worth learning.

The question in my mind now is what to do with PageFour. Should I let it carry on, earning a small amount each month and building up an equally small user base? Or should I release it as freeware, the place most passionate software truly belongs, and build up a much larger user base?

Version 1.43 of PageFour has just been released. There are no cool new features, no major improvements or enhancements, simply a fix to a single bug. In certain software development circles there is an opinion that the word ‘bug‘ should never be used, that it has a negative feel to it and does little to inspire confidence. The favoured term to replace this three letter word is ‘opportunity.’

This minor release therefore is simply an opportunity to improve the page numbering feature of the product. More details can be found on the What’s New page of the web-site along with a download link.

A few days ago I stumbled across a useful piece of FREE software for creating PDF documents called - wait for it - PDFCreator. It installs itself as a printer driver and allows you to convert any document type quickly to PDF, saving you from passing your hard earned cash to Adobe. This is worth a look, as it hooks in neatly with MS Word as well as PageFour.

What does it say about you that you measure your worth by whether or not a web-site graces you with a red heart every week?

www.download.com is the number one software download site; the site all the cool guys rave about; the site that is supposed to make or break a small software company. Every Sunday, the total number of downloads are added up for each product, and those with a sizeable number are awarded an image of a blood red heart to signify their huge popularity and general worth. No doubt suicide rates amongst the ranks of Shareware authors peak on a Sunday evening.

And what does it take these days to be popular? When products such as SpySweeper and Winzip regularly notch up six digit figures each week you’d be forgiven for assuming the bar to the heart would be great indeed. You’d be wrong.

Twenty downloads. Twenty clicks and this download site amongst download sites flog their good opinion and recommendation to all and sundry.

They’re a cheap date and I’m not impressed. Thankfully I gave up relying on download sites months ago, but I still feel I should be jumping up and down every week over my bloody red heart.

Ten days ago, PageFour was picked up by a series of British computer magazines, nost notably Computer Active, What PC, and Computing. When I say picked up - it featured as a recommendation on their software download sites and appeared in the newsletter they send out to subscribers. This has resulted in a large increase in downloads, sales, and enquiries. My first thought when the figures shot up was that yet another dodgy download site in Hong Kong or Russia had found me.

PageFour ships as a thirty day trial version, so it’s too early to say how effective this push will turn out to be, but even now, ten days on, the download figures remain high and sales keep trickling in.

I played no part in this whatsoever.

Just over a week ago I attempted a marketing push of my own, where I offered free copies to anyone prepared to blog about or mention the product on their web-site. The plan was to generate some sort of buzz around PageFour, as up to now it had had limited exposure, popping up on blogs and discussion boards only rarely.

They succeeded. I didn’t.

The strategy had merit, as other companies had tried similar drives before. A few months ago, a company called Axosoft released their flagship product for five dollars, with all the money going to the American Red Cross. They shipped thousands of copies over a three day period and appeared on the front pages of del.ic.ious and Reddit.

So the question is, why did I fail where Computer Active succeeded? They had little to gain from promoting a small software product owned by another company, whereas I built PageFour and invested much time and energy in making it as perfect as possible.

What it boils down to is that they have a voice that is heard, and I don’t. Sending a targeted newsletter with a list of new software recommendations to people who’ve specifically asked you to do so, is very different from standing on a soapbox in the middle of an empty square and offering your product to a busy world.

If no one is listening, then it doesn’t matter what you say or how loud you say it.