Brent gives a good example of thinking from the user’s perspective. He also writes about how listening is very important for developers. This is one of the major frustrations I had in enterprise software and one of the joys of working on my own software. In enterprise software, customer feature requests would filter through 2, 3, even 4 people before they got to me and often people wouldn’t have asked the customer the right follow-up questions or the request had gotten lost in the translation somewhere. As Brent describes, listening and responding to the user’s underlying motivation rather than the specific request usually a better way to go.
Mark Pilgrim has some interesting RSS reader stats. I have tried SharpReader 3 times and given up on it 3 times… the latest being 2 weeks ago with the new Windows laptop. it just doesn’t work as nice and easy as NetNewsWire.
A gigapixel image - wow! I think that was taken out to the left of this shot.
AWESOME! Hao Li has released Saft 5.5 which now includes type-ahead-find! For those of you who don’t realize how wonderful this is, here is his description of the feature:
Type-ahead searching is a fast way to search web page content that exists in some of other browsers. To use type-ahead searching you need to turn on "Type-ahead support" under Misc tab of Saft preference pane. Once it is on, you can click inside a browser window and make sure that no input field are selected, then just type the word you want to search for in the content. Saft will search and select the word while you are typing so you get visual feedback. You can use "Find Again" (cmd-G) to repeat the searching. The type-ahead searching will be reset after an idle time of one second.
Unfortunately, I can’t seem to get it installed. It seems to be a SIMBL issue - perhaps because I had it installed in Jaguar and now I’m trying to re-install on Panther?
Michael Heilemann adds this Comment:
FeedDemon is the only RSS reader for Windows worth spending time with. IMHO
December 8th, 2003 at 2:46 am
Luke Hutteman adds this Comment:
I unfortunately don’t have a Mac so I’ve never used NNW, making it hard for me to compare it to SharpReader.
May I ask what it is about SharpReader that you feel is missing, poorly implemented, buggy, etc.? You feedback may help me improve it and possibly even survive a fourth try…
December 8th, 2003 at 6:29 am
Alex adds this Comment:
Hi Luke–
Since you are interested in the feedback, I’ll give it another shot sometime soon and send you notes on the things that made it uncomfortable for me. Thanks for dropping by and leaving a note.
December 8th, 2003 at 8:38 am
Luke Hutteman adds this Comment:
ok - I guess we’ll have to make that “possibly even survive a fifth try” then
thanks in advance for the feedback!
December 8th, 2003 at 1:48 pm