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Fri, 26 Mar 2010 I was trying to think today of the last time I received a complaint about the user interfaces of my programs. The last time I can remember was last August, when NameFind received some pretty harsh criticism during a MacZot promotion. This was right before I began the big push to migrate my applications to Tk-Cocoa, to improve the UI style of the applications, and to improve their integration with Mac-specific technologies. The only integration issue I'm still dealing with is a fuller implementation of drag-and-drop, which I'm working on as part of an update to NameFind. I think those changes have paid off quite nicely. I still get complaints about the price of my applications, I still get complaints about crashes because of third-party extensions on Snow Leopard, and I still get complaints about specific features and functionality--but I don't get complaints about look-and-feel, platform-integration issues. Even if my programs are not perfect in this regard, they're good enough. So what now? For the past couple of years, at least, I've focused more on platform integration than on features in my programs. In other words, I've focused on improving and refining the user experience rather than offering lots of new functionality. This isn't a bad strategy. But I think now the time has come to shift the balance back toward development of application features, rather than improving the platform I use to develop my programs. While those platform improvements can be rolled into every one of my programs, they can't be applied in an across-the-board way to the problems that each program is designed to solve. I've already started moving in this direction. Updates to QuickWho and Manpower included some common features--AppleScript and Services support, most prominently--but also some differences, including price adjustments to different levels. By contrast, my update of PacketStream had more application-specific changes, no price change, and no integration with AppleScript or Services, because such features don't really make sense in this application's domain. NameFind, next on the update list, will get some application-specific changes, and also one big remaining platform feature that I'm working on at the same time: drag-and-drop. And the last two the last two current applications on the update cycle, PortAuthority and Phynchronicity, will likely get more application-specific changes. At that point, I'll be ready to work on some entirely new applications, which I've been planning for a couple of years but postponed because of my need to work on the platform level, rather than the application level. It's my hope that as I'm moving my application focus to a different level, I'll be moving my sales to a different level as well. |
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