Priacta

A lot of software companies maintain development blogs. In fact, I’d venture to say that over 50% of GTD-related software providers have blogs. Until now, Priacta stubbornly ignored this trend, and for a good reason. Why talk about the features, when we can let you use them? Maintaining a blog consumes time that could be spent creating features instead.

So why the change of heart? Ironically, it was a new feature!

We have been developing support for projects, which is no small task when you are bound to Outlook’s database. On the one hand, the project support works, and we are starting to use it internally. The feature is very useful, and we have received emails from many customers begging us to get it out there so they can use it. On the other hand, it is missing important functionality, has a number of known bugs that we aren’t really proud of, and we’re not sure we like the way it works in some places. In short, we do not think it is done, but folks are asking for it anyway. What do we do?

For a while it has been possible to dynamically enable “Beta Features.” This allows users to get access to new features and bug fixes while they are still in beta testing. Beta Features can be enabled on a whim from the options screen, and turned off without having to re-install. We recently realized however that we could do one better.

We’ve extended our existing Beta Features functionality to allow for “Preview Features.” Just as with Beta Features you can turn on these Preview Features at runtime. Unlike Beta Features, these are cutting edge, definitely not complete, and have a number of known unresolved issues; however, they are probably still very useful. Everything about a Preview Feature is a work in progress, and is highly negotiable. This means that Preview Features can change significantly and users can easily mold it by sharing their wants and needs with the developers. It also means that they don’t have to wait for the features to be released “someday.”

The concept of releasing functionality in early previews and betas is not new. Microsoft has done this with many of their products, most notably Vista and Orcas. Google allows you to turn on “experimental” search features, or occasionally tags functionality in their tools as “Beta.” Open source projects typically allow people to download the absolute latest code and build it themselves.

Each of these systems has its faults though. Microsoft requires you to download massive installers, and installing beta versions of Microsoft products usually causes problems when you get the real one, costing hours or days of time just to use the features early. Google makes it easy and seamless, but sometimes there is no way to “opt out” if the changes are giving you trouble, meaning it is really a released feature, with enough known bugs to put a “beta” tag on it. The SVN repository used by open source projects is so technical, that even hardened programmers will avoid it.

What we’ve done with the Trog Bar is combine the best of it all. The beta features come as easily and seamlessly as with Google’s variety. Like with Microsoft’s system, you can opt in or out, but unlike the Microsoft approach, this doesn’t require you to uninstall the beta version, and reinstall the normal one.

So we can deliver Previews Features with all the geeky benefits, congratulations to us, but why does this change the blog situation? It changes because now we don’t have to blog about the development of great new stuff we will give you someday. Instead we can blog about the development of great new stuff that you can already try. The blog ceases to be a hole to throw valuable development time into, and becomes a communication medium for discussing development of the latest thing in Trog. So give it a shot, turn on Preview Features and take a look at our first one: Natural Project Management. Tell us what you like, and what you hate, what you want, and what you’d rather not have. Your feedback will shape the development of this, and other features.