With MacFormat’s ex-deputy editor and massive fan of great text editors busy editing Tap!, I was asked by the magazine to review Scrivener 2. A version of the review is on TechRadar; safe to say, I loved the app, but there was one thing I disliked: the new two-up page view didn’t provide an easy way to ‘snap’ to the top of each set of pages. This meant I’d be stuck using (*shudder*) Word for the body copy of large features, where I’d roughly hack things into shape and then flit back and forth, making edits and rearranging blocks of content.
So I decided to mention this to the app’s author, thinking perhaps I’d be able to switch over to Scrivener more fully at some distant point in the future. Later the same day, a whopping email came in: it was a beta of Scrivener. The feature was there, in the form of two little arrows on a lower toolbar. I thanked the developer but said keyboard shortcuts are what everyone really pines for, so hands never stray from the keyboard. “Oh, that’s easy,” I was told, shortly before receiving another beta. A week or two later, the next version of the app shipped, with this new feature, which I hope was worth the dev’s time in being useful to people other than me.
What this all shows isn’t OH MY GOD CRAIG IS SO CLEVER AND SHOULD DESIGN YOUR SOFTWARE, but that rapid iteration and developer interaction can change the way software development works. Clearly, developers shouldn’t weld every feature request to their wares, but when someone asks for something you think might benefit many of your users, or you’ve a large number of people asking for something and are small enough to respond relatively quickly, it can pay to do so.
Another recent incident along these lines concerned iA Writer for iPad. I was sent a promo code for the original release, had a quick play, then put the app aside. Later, I started trying to integrate the iPad more into my workflow and was dismayed to find iA had binned the app’s character count in favour of word count. For many of my articles (including those for Tap!), I’m commissioned to write a specific number of characters, and this made iA Writer useless for the tasks I most needed it for. A quick enquiry resulted in the discovery that Americans had complained en masse about the character count (saying, of course, that everyone used word count), and so iA had switched it to a word count. “We then got moaned at by European writers as they predominantly use character count,” said a contact at iA. “Suffice to say, a toggle is coming in the next version.” And, sure enough, iA Writer for iPad now displays both of these counts, making it massively more useful for all professional writers. And further feature-request demands and suggestions have recently filled chunks of my Twitter feed, with journo chums and the guys behind iA Writer for Mac and Byword (another streamlined Mac text editor) swapping ideas.
This kind of interaction and revision cycle is a far cry from what happens at certain larger companies. I know people who’ve been part of beta runs for some very large products and watched, every time, as revolutionary ideas are discarded; the monolithic software vehicle then barely manages to turn a fraction of a degree before churning out its next version. And from what I see in the Mac App Store, now is a good chance—on the Mac at least—for fleet-of-foot indies to capitalise on this, by making use of the biggest testing pool possible: their customers.
So if you’re writing software (be it creative, utilities, games or anything else), don’t hide behind a website with no contact details or Get Satisfaction integration that you never bother to answer. Instead, encourage as much feedback as you possibly can—get on Twitter and talk to your customers, and iterate quickly when good ideas come your way. The big companies can’t or won’t do this, but you can; and by getting great word of mouth and being a responsive, alert, savvy developer, you could increasingly be the one getting plaudits and making money.