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.

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.

PageFour has received its second five star review on Download.com, which is very welcome. I’m always slightly scared that someone will hate the product and post a terrible review, but it hasn’t happened yet, so fingers crossed. Reviews by users have a big impact on the number of downloads - I often use them myself as a guide to whether something is worth trying out or not.

What PC have also reviewed the product and awarded it five stars. When it comes to the multitude of smaller download sites, I’ve always taken the reviews and awards with a pinch of salt, as they tend to award every submission the same high mark. They appear to be designed to keep the developers of the product happy rather than guiding the potential user. What PC seems to be a little different as it awards a good proportion of low marks, so I’ll take it as a compliment.

The new printing options in PageFour have finally been put to rest - for the time being at least. Version 1.42 is now available for download, and I’m more than happy with how it’s turned out.

This version makes the construction of the print templates simpler and easier to understand, and adds a new feature for anyone with multiple printers or print devices such as PDF writers.

Feedback, as always, is more than welcome.

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.

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.

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?

The beta version of PageFour 1.4 has just been released.

Development over the past few weeks has gone very well, and I’m more than happy with the result. Every time I make a major change or addition to PageFour I start wondering how I possibly managed without it, and the new printing options are no exception.

The Print Templates add yet another unique feature and key selling point to the product, which alongside the Snapshot and Archiving features make PageFour stand out from its competitors. Now all I have to do is capitalise on this uniqueness and turn it into downloads and sales.

Ain’t life grand.

Work is almost complete on the next version of PageFour. This release will see major improvements to the printing capabilities of the product, focusing as always on the needs of writers, rather than business users.

Building on feedback over the past few months, the basic printing options of version 1.3 have been drastically overhauled. Changes include:

Lack of control over headers and footers has always been a weakness of PageFour, so I’m very pleased that this is about to be resolved. The key feature of the coming release however, is the ability to print using different font and paragraph settings to those you use when writing.

I work on a high resolution monitor, and use Verdana 11 as my default font, with single line spacing. The changes in version 1.4 will allow me to continue using these settings, yet print using Times New Roman 12, with one and a half line spacing. Different publishers have different requirements, and the font or paragraph settings you use when writing may be completely different to those you would use when printing a manuscript. In the past, you may have had to change these settings within the document each time before printing. With version 1.4 of PageFour, it’s simply a case of setting up however many print templates you may need, and choosing which one to use when printing.

If all goes to plan, a beta version should be available for download and testing this weekend, with the release version following a week later. If anyone is interested in trying out the beta version, please and I’ll point you in the right direction. Previous beta testers have had a major impact on the shape of the product, so it’s a good opportunity to have a say in how PageFour develops.

Programmers don’t like users. In an ideal world, whatever product they are designing would be beautifully written with the latest trendy technology, passed on to a testing department (preferably in a different city), and never sold to a single user. It would work like a charm when configured correctly through hacking various text and script files in Notepad, produce in depth exception reports for every problem encountered, and have a beautifully crafted and fully modular framework of code that can be reused in every future conceivable product - whether a flight simulator for NASA or a stock inventory for Jerry’s Fish and Chip Shop.

The problem with users is that they tend to get this crazy idea that what they see on the screen actually is the product. They seem to think that the hastily thrown together heap of grey dialogs and tacky icons sourced from a free download site is what they’ve paid all that money for.

They’d be right.

Software is designed to be used, which means it’s designed for users to use. Note the emphasis on the word use here. When someone pays you money for a piece of software, they don’t care how the underlying code base has been constructed, and they don’t care about the structure of the database. All that matters is: Can I use it to do the job, or will it cause me grief?

Every programmer pays lip service these days to the importance of user interfaces, but in most cases they don’t really believe it. Like an alcoholic who tells you about his drink problem, they say the words because they are the words people expect to hear, but deep down they still believe that they control the drink, it does not control them, and the GUI really isn’t as important as the engine running underneath.

For too many programmers the GUI is the bit bolted on at the last minute to satisfy users and the guys in sales. It is often designed by someone who thinks typing configuration commands into a text file is far more useful than an interactive GUI with trees and checkboxes; that a visual interface can never allow the flexibility and customisation of a simple configuration file. This is all true - if the sole user of the product is the guy who wrote it!

If you don’t think about the user from day one, you will never design a truly great product; you will never design a product people want to use. Even the giants make this mistake. I stumbled across an article the other day on the failings of Lotus Notes, one of IBMs big groupware products everyone was talking about ten years ago. To quote one of the many disgruntled users:

“Notes’s backend functionality has no bearing on us 100m or so end-users. As far as we are concerned the GUI is the system. And boyo… is the GUI client a heap of ill-conceived, non-intuitive rubbish.”

Lotus Notes now has the dubious honour of its very own hate site where its many failings and embarrassments are displayed and dissected for all the world to see.

There’s a lot more competition out there today than there was ten or twenty years ago. If you build a technological marvel and ship it with a shabby user interface, and the competition builds a functional product that looks fantastic, who do you think will win the sale?