Tag: Software

Up until my latest product, I typically wrote software that was a bit complex and not easy to setup. This is due to my slightly over active brain trying to solve a problem in what may not be the easiest way. So when I sold software, I could understand when people couldn’t set it up and wanted a refund (I didn’t like it, of course), so I put verbiage into my store that required people to confirm that the software was working before purchasing so I didn’t have to deal with refunds. I thought that my latest product was different because my parents have been using it without problems (they’re pretty smart, but sometimes have issues with computers), but a user today proved me wrong. Not only did the user not read my no return policy (uhhh, that’s why there is a demo), the user never contacted me for support and his problems were quite minor with one being he couldn’t delete a receipt (hit the delete key, more on this in another post) and he couldn’t put receipts in collections; the mechanism for doing this is the same as iTunes and iPhoto and I don’t hear people complaining about them. I gave the user back his money (minus the processing fee) as frankly, I didn’t want to deal with him. For a product that is pretty easy to use and has a demo, I shouldn’t have to deal with stupid users.

The shareware software market has really changed how people value software. Many hobbyists create their shareware for $5 or $10 to make some spare change. This is fine and dandy, but with the sheer amount of shareware out there (a lot of it is junk), when a commercial product (not by Adobe or Microsoft) comes out for $30 or $40, people complain that it is overpriced. This is truly sad as software isn’t cheap to create. The shareware market allowed me to personally get into software development, but I started my first product off at $15 and that was over a decade ago. Software also costs money to support and one support email/call can wipe out any profit.

I’ve seen some recent rumblings from other developers about the same thing, so I’m definitely not alone in my feelings.

I’ve never liked these folks as they have been stealing (or used to steal) update information directly off VersionTracker. I had posted an update to a program of mine to VersionTracker once and made a spelling error. The same spelling error appeared on MacUpdate pretty quickly. Coincidence? Unlikely. Now the good folks at MacUpdate have decided that they couldn’t make enough money on ad revenue, so they’ve sold their mailing list to spammers. How do I know this? For every different website I visit and give an email address, I create a new email alias in the form of website.com@mydomain.com. From the header of the spam, you can tell where it went and that it came from a spammer:

Received: from transit-r1.garyzoom.com (pptpoe-pool-195-114-8-88.rustel-dsl.com [195.114.8.88]) by linux.gruby.com (8.13.8/8.13.8) with ESMTP id kAMDbIFi023692 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA bits=256 verify=NOT) for ; Wed, 22 Nov 2006 05:37:20 -0800

With a title like “Subject: One free MAC title download: latest Ableton, Adobe, Corel, Extensis , Macromedia for MAC OS X” and coming off a DSL line, you can tell it is spam.

I’ve been using email programs for the last 15 years on an almost day to day basis. While I definitely don’t hold the record for how long I’ve been using them, I have been using email for almost the entire era since the Internet became popular (graphs I’ve seen show 1994-1995 is when there became a huge influx of users). Over that time, I’ve used a number of email programs and worked with a bunch more through my NotifyMail program. For a very long time, I used Eudora (1992-2002, I think) and even had the opportunity to be on the development team for a few years. Eudora had a ton of features and has an extremely loyal following. I gave up on Eudora a few years back because I wanted to have a central address book and Apple’s Mail offered that along with iSync. Mail doesn’t have all the features that Eudora has, but frankly, I can’t even recall what I’m missing. Also, Eudora’s interface was years out of date and user interface is extremely important to me.

Recently, it was announced that Eudora was going to be re-born as an open source project and I’ve seen people real happy about this. I just don’t understand why. Mail does a fine job for 95% of the Mac users, but some people are just stubborn. If you think people are stubborn about Eudora, I received an email today with the following at the top: “Claris Emailer 2.0v3, January 22, 1998”. Whoa, using an 8 year old email program is almost asking for trouble as lots of things have changed and matured with respect to email.

There will never be pleasing everyone, especially with software.