On Sep 29, 2006, at 13:46, Google Kreme wrote:
Yeah, the trouble with new features is that they are sometimes hard to get into people's heads. I mean, what do you do, make a big announcement and show off your new flashy looking Album view... well, ok, that works if it's something flashy and visual. But BBEdit is a text editor, and at its core, it's boring. That's not insulting at all, it SHOULD be boring. It NEEDS to be boring. That's it's job, stay out of the way and lemme work.
One problem is that a lot of power users refuse to read the docs. I know all about the cool factor and the geek factor, but I also know that the best programs are very deep, and in this respect, BBEdit is in the royal family. For instance, did you know that you can opt--on the fly--for faster or slower scroll speeds when scrolling through a window? The program is loaded with this sort of stuff, but the only way you're going to find out about it is by reading the docs. During a time when _The_Missing_Manual_ is a very popular third-party series of books, Bare Bones continues to take the time to produce superb documentation for BBEdit. Yeah, I was sad when they stopped including a printed version for free (or at least making one freely available, which I thought was a smart move), but at least they still provide it in electronic format.
As most of the folks on this list probably know, the bulk of the new user-level features (with a couple of big exceptions) in 8.5 really aren't that new, but are older features with tweaked interfaces. Now, I'm all for making legitimate improvements to UIs, and I think 8.5 is great, but there's no reason anyone should not have long been using any of these features where they were relevant. But of course, a lot of folks *haven't* been using them, and often haven't even realized they existed. Thus, I would have to say that BB has smartly used 8.5 to respond to that big group of people who don't read manuals but then complain loudly that the program lacks some feature that it in fact does possess.
And then the other thing is that people who have been using BBEdit a long time will probably continue using the feature set they started using and very rarely will they integrate a new feature into their workflow. It takes a lot to shift muscle-memory.
That may be true, but it's certainly not true in my case, and I've been using it in various capacities since very soon after it was first released on my birthday back in '93. These days, when a new release of BBEdit comes out, my ritual is to print out the wonderfully detailed release notes, drop everything else, and head for the couch for some nice, geeky reading. I then download the new version and go through the list item-by-item to explore the changes. I also make a point to actively think about each new feature to see how it could positively impact my work, and if I can think of a way for that to happen, I work on making it happen. Lately, for instance, I've been working on getting all my language-specific settings just right.
In fact, I think I'd be worried about people who *didn't* adopt new features. Well-chosen features increase productivity, and I would hate to see people only achieving half their possible productivity because they're not using features that would benefit them. I'd hate even more to be paying those same people :-).
I mean, how would you suggest Barebones tout new features? Announcing them and documenting them and saying "you want <feature>" when someone asks a question is what they've done to date, and it's what I expect. But what could be done better to promote new features? Or old features that we suspect are under- utilized?
I think the greatest marketing bit for TextMate was the RoR video, which showed off some of TextMate's features in a real-world way. Tutorials can accomplish much the same thing, but again, people don't like to read. Perhaps BB should consider making a series of short videos that show off BBEdit's flashier features, while quietly also showing its less-flashy features.
For instance, I can imagine a video that shows the user selecting the Save command, which triggers an attached script that transparently saves the file locally, updates it in a VCS, and posts it on a web server. Or another where an HTML file is opened off an SFTP server (with the internal browser or an external one), a Text Factory is run on it that uses the Tidy command and maybe some searches and replaces to convert the file to clean XHTML, and the file is saved back to the server. And while all this big stuff is happening, people get exposed to things like syntax coloring, UTF support, PCRE support, Unix script integration, language-sensitive editing features, and so on - all those things that play big roles in everyday use but are hard to show off on their own in a value-oriented way.
Regards, Bob -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Have a feature request? Not sure the software's working correctly? If so, please send mail to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, not to the list. List FAQ: <http://www.barebones.com/support/lists/bbedit_talk.shtml> List archives: <http://www.listsearch.com/BBEditTalk.lasso> To unsubscribe, send mail to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
