Rather than pick another whinge from IRC or Twitter from a fellow developer and risk alienating the entire Mac developer community, I am using an example of feedback for my own product, Differencia.

The following information was just submitted via the DayTime Software Internet site Contact form.

First Name: John

Last Name: Dontwantoleavemyname

Telephone Number:

Email Address: fakeemail@yahoo.com

Message:
Your program is difficult to use and confusing. Take a look at standard “diff” programs for text. This program should emulate those, because that is what users are already used to, and the programs work well. Instead, you’ve created a whole different paradigm that just left me scratching my head. Templates? Okay–a great option. But what if I don’t have a template or don’t want to bother with one? Plus, the program crashed several times on me. This needs a lot of work if you’re going to sell it.

There was no way for me to respond as no valid contact information was left. Others might complain that he did not “get” my product, or that his feedback was very unconstructive. In fact that was my first response as well, and tweeted as much.

The main point is that Differencia is not a “standard diff program”. It is intended to work with data files that standard diff programs cannot handle. A new paradigm, as he puts it, was required as other diff programs simply cannot handle the use cases that Differencia was intended for.

However I have gone back to deconstruct the feedbacl, to try and understand how he failed to understand the product.

The lessons I learnt are:

• I have optimised the site for search terms that include “diff”. This is precisely to attract people looking for diff programs that handle exceptional cases. However I do not stress heavily on the site that Differencia does not (currently) handle non-structured text files such as source code or documents.
• I have not, perhaps, emphasised enough on the site that Templates are a convenience but not a requirement for Differencia to work well.
• I have not done enough testing with source code and other file types to ensure that they do not trigger crashes.
• Not a new lesson, but I know that I need to do a mix of usability improvements and add tutorials to the website / product

Instead of bemoaning hyper-critical feedback and how useless it is, I have taken stock, assumed there is something I can learn and improve on, and worked hard to gather something positive from the feedback.

In Martin’s post and the comments there are some links to great resources to get going with accessibility:

Apple’s Accessibility Developer Page.

Assistive Technology for the Mac Resources

Assistive Ware Videos

At WWDC ’06 I went to the Accessibility session and it was the best Hands-On sesssion I’ve been to at WWDC. The 2006 Session video does not seem to be available any more, but the 2008 session can be found from the link below. It requires access to ADC on iTunes, you may need to log into ADC on iTunes first, or simply look for session 326.

WWDC ’08 – Session 326 – Application Accessibility

The 2006 session had an excellent sample application, Dicey, that takes you through stages of increased accessibility. It can be found here:

Dicey Sample Code

However I would like to extend Martin’s challenge. Most independent Mac software developers sell their products exclusively via the web. Therefore for their software to be fully accessible, Mac developers need to make their websites accessible as well.

Information on this can be found at W3C, the web’s standards body, and elsewhere:

W3C’s Accesibility Initiative

Dive Into Accessibility Guide

I would call on all Mac developers to take up the Mac Accessibility Challenge.

There has been a long outstanding issue with licenses not being recognised when Internet Sharing is enabled. It was brought to my notice today that the new release was sometimes not recognising licenses on Intel based Macs as well.

This release fixes both these issues.

DayTime Software announces Differencia 1.1 for Mac OS X

It is a free upgrade for all existing users.

We have now discontinued our introductory price of $29.95. New users can purchase from the DayTime online store for just $39.95.

• The Differencia application help is now also available online
• The screen shot gallery has been revised to take you through the work flow for using Differencia to diff / compare files
• There is a new Use Cases page giving examples of what Differencia can be used for
• Also added a Release Notes page. There is also a new blog category, specifically for release notes.
• There are also some cosmetic changes. For example, the gallery’s lightbox is now easier to navigate and better matches the overall website design.

Please feel free to explore the updated website and let me have any feedback for making the site more useful.

I believe that Differencia is a truly unique diff tool for the Mac, and want to make its home on the web equally useful for its users.

A kind user let us know, earlier this week, that templates were not available for download from the database. Although items were listed on the database, there were errors if you tried to download the actual template files. We added the first templates to the online database at the beginning of February. Unfortunately, it appears that the templates have probably not been available for most of the intervening time.

We restored the templates, only to find they were being removed again. We tracked down the source of the problem to an automated clean up process in our shopping cart software. The problem should now have been resolved.

Our apologies to all our customers, who have not been able access these templates.

Also, the database has only a limited number of templates available for the moment. We are working to expand the catalog, in conjunction with our forthcoming 1.1 release.

There’s an egg somewhere on this site and to start looking for more, click on the image below:

Instructions for how to export contact information from each of these systems can be found by in the detail of each template in the online database.

Apple Address Book

Apple’s Address Book cannot currently export directly to a flat file format that Differencia can import. However Address Book can export to the standard vCard format with files with extension .vcf. There is an excellent utility on the web that will convert vCard files from any source into flat file formats that Differencia can handle. The Address Book templates in the database are based on the output from this vCard Format Converter.

The VCF Converter is quick and reliable and none of your private contact information is ever stored or available to the website running the converter. The converter can be found here.

NB. You will need Differencia 1.0.3 or later to make use of these templates.

Future Directions

Comparing Contact information provides some fascinating challenges for a comparison and reconciliation tool such as Differencia. In the future I hope to add some intelligence to Differencia with regard to contact data so that it can:

• Make a probable match between “Mr J Smith” and “John Smith”
• Understand international & area codes, so that a Home Phone of “+1-408-555-1234″ is the same as a Home Phone of “5551234″ for someone with a Home Address in Cupertino, CA, USA.
• Add support for direct access to Apple’s Address Book, without need for conversion
• Direct support for vCard (vcf) and LDIF files

We would appreciate any further feedback on how we can improve Differencia, so feel free to contact us.