Wednesday 8 April 2009

Your system not supported. Now what?

I just came across an interesting approach to the traditional "not-available-for-your-system" message. BumpTop has just been released for free download, and even though that's great news since it's an impressive piece of software on its own, the concept itself has been made public a while ago, so it wasn't new to me. The good surprise was instead the way they handled the fact that they don't have yet versions for Mac or Linux.

You see, most companies give us a "we're-sorry-but" or "coming-soon" message (not to speak of those, especially linuxers, who tell you to build the app using the source, or to code it yourself -- which, as I read a few days ago, is actually saying "f**k you" to the user), but the guys at BumpTop made an interesting twist:

They use the always compelling poll look to let you quick and easily add your voice to the crowd, which on the other hand gives them a way to measure the demand for those versions, while simultaneously offering a way for you to get feedback (by entering your email) and get notified once your desired product is available.

Those are all positive signs they're passing to you. No "sorry, not available yet", no "we have no plans to support your system". Just a very simple mechanism that works for everyone. It's win-win! I hope the idea spreads around.

PS - thanks Paulo, for the invite to post on this blog. I'll try to keep your standards of quality ;)

Wednesday 1 April 2009

Creating a Web-Based Document Platform

Remember the "old document paradigm" post? Me and the team I'm working with, always had a hard time dealing with multi-user documents because right now there are no good alternatives to writing it in word and tossing around updates, specially because this particular project we are working in involves lots of partners scattered around Europe. Last week I started programming this web-based document platform to handle multi-users, change tracking, comments, section locking and other useful features! In just a couple of days I got a working prototype that already feels powerful and promising! It started out as a challenge and it felt great because I was, by coincidence, materializing this idea that I had in mind for awhile.

In a way we are all changing the way the world works, bit by bit :)