Allen Brunson
2005-10-27 14:01:51 UTC
okay then! paid registrations are now officially "steady." i <heart> you
guys and gals who <heart> my program enough to pay for it. once i get to
feature parity with the established players, i should be doing very well
indeed.
as far as i can tell, all my registrations thus far have been from U.S.
citizens. (payment records include customers' addresses.) i was hoping to
attract a few europeans and asians. i bet half of my registrations from the
beos version came from non-americans. perhaps this is a simple fact of the
two operating systems' differing userbases, and not something i can do
anything about.
none of the paid mac users have ever had any questions whatsoever. in fact,
in the entire history of pnews registrations, i think there have been only two
support requests. both were people who e-mailed me saying "hey! my key
doesn't work?" i e-mailed back with "are you sure you typed it in right?
it's very long, you must get it EXACTLY RIGHT or else it won't work. try cut
and paste." i didn't hear from them again.
so maybe this means that i did such a good job on the manual that nobody needs
support? that's all well and good, but i wish you people would speak up
anyway. i got a lot more feedback in the early days of the beos version than
i am getting here in the early days of the mac version. okay, actually i got
a lot of feedback within the first few days of macosx/pnews' release, but
almost all of it was negative. "not mac-like enough," "looks like an ugly
macos9 port," "not enough features," "not fast enough," "why would i use this
when i can use program x," etc. i discounted most of the complainers as not
among my target audience and got back to work. so, what happened between now
and then? i have to assume a few people noticed the *good* parts: it never
crashes, there are very few bugs, and almost no anomalous behavior. and i'm
pretty sure my program deals with languages and character sets better than any
other mac newsreader.
i SWARE i am still hard at work on the next version, which all you registered
folks will get for free. finding every single user-visible string in the
program and moving them all out to the strings file is monumentally boring,
error-prone, and tedious. it's going kind of slow. after that, i'll finally
get to filtering, the feature everybody and his brother ralph has a cow about.
guys and gals who <heart> my program enough to pay for it. once i get to
feature parity with the established players, i should be doing very well
indeed.
as far as i can tell, all my registrations thus far have been from U.S.
citizens. (payment records include customers' addresses.) i was hoping to
attract a few europeans and asians. i bet half of my registrations from the
beos version came from non-americans. perhaps this is a simple fact of the
two operating systems' differing userbases, and not something i can do
anything about.
none of the paid mac users have ever had any questions whatsoever. in fact,
in the entire history of pnews registrations, i think there have been only two
support requests. both were people who e-mailed me saying "hey! my key
doesn't work?" i e-mailed back with "are you sure you typed it in right?
it's very long, you must get it EXACTLY RIGHT or else it won't work. try cut
and paste." i didn't hear from them again.
so maybe this means that i did such a good job on the manual that nobody needs
support? that's all well and good, but i wish you people would speak up
anyway. i got a lot more feedback in the early days of the beos version than
i am getting here in the early days of the mac version. okay, actually i got
a lot of feedback within the first few days of macosx/pnews' release, but
almost all of it was negative. "not mac-like enough," "looks like an ugly
macos9 port," "not enough features," "not fast enough," "why would i use this
when i can use program x," etc. i discounted most of the complainers as not
among my target audience and got back to work. so, what happened between now
and then? i have to assume a few people noticed the *good* parts: it never
crashes, there are very few bugs, and almost no anomalous behavior. and i'm
pretty sure my program deals with languages and character sets better than any
other mac newsreader.
i SWARE i am still hard at work on the next version, which all you registered
folks will get for free. finding every single user-visible string in the
program and moving them all out to the strings file is monumentally boring,
error-prone, and tedious. it's going kind of slow. after that, i'll finally
get to filtering, the feature everybody and his brother ralph has a cow about.
--
A free market interprets monopoly as damage and routes around it.
-- Paul Graham
A free market interprets monopoly as damage and routes around it.
-- Paul Graham