Shareware Beach

It’s been a while since my last post here. Longer than I had intended.

In April I started feeling some serious discomfort in my arms and wrists. Nothing serious enough to stop me from using a computer all day. Yet serious enough for me to get serious about ergonomics and RSI prevention. I love what I do and I make a nice living from it. I’d rather break a leg (again) than to lose the fine motor control in my hands, so I can keep on breaking a leg in cyberspace (and write bad puns). So I started with reducing my workload and cutting all non-vital PC activities, including blogging, gradually building things back up.

Anyway, with lots of patience and practice, five months and over a thousand dollars later, I’m good as new. I’ve made some permanent changes to my equipment and daily routine that should keep me going for another decade. More about all that in the coming weeks and months at the Shareware Beach.

It’s been two months since I commented on Borland’s planned spin-off. Time for an update.

The release of BDS 2006 Update 2 shows that Delphi et al. are still in active development. If Borland merely wanted to get rid of the products at the best possible price, there would be no point in releasing a free update. I installed it this morning. The most obvious improvement is that switching between files in the code editor is once again virtually instant.

Allen Bauer has been blogging about the spin-off quite a bit. Allen is one of the leaders in the BDS/Delphi product team(s).

David I hosted a chat with several well-known long-time Delphi supporters and component vendors. I only recently got around to listening to the replay. The most interesting bit of information in the chat was given by David I himself around 70 minutes into the chat, where he talks about the status of the spin-off.

Obviously, Borland being a public company, David I and co. are legally limited in what they can say. But he did say that all the interested parties are investment banker and venture capital types. That’s good news.

There’s been quite some speculation in the Delphi newsgroups about potential buyers. Many expressed hope that this or that large software company would pick up Delphi and put their weight behind it. I think being bought by a software company is the worst thing that could happen to Delphi.

Delphi’s problem right now is that it’s owned by a company that’s not focused on development tools. Delphi competes for resources with the ALM products, and ALM is what’s getting the attention at Borland. If another software company bought Delphi, Delphi would simply end up in the same situation.

So what do these capitalist banker’s know about software development? Well, not much. And that’s the key. They’ll let the people who do know about the technical side of the business make the product development decisions, as long as the business is profitable. Since Borland claims their development tools are profitable, and 3rd party developers claim (in the chat) that the 3rd party market is still healthy, this should be an attainable goal.

Search results returned by the major search engines often leave me frustrated. I’ve wanted to blog about this topic for some time. Today, I stumbled upon a surprising example.

This morning I was messing around with the February CTP of Windows Vista. I tried installing Delphi 2006, but it didn’t get past installing its many prerequisites. So I fired up IE and typed “delphi 2006″ install vista in the search box. The first page of MSN’s search results didn’t list any pages talking about installing Delphi 2006 on Vista. However, the #1 search result had me quite surprised. So I repeated the search on Google Thailand, Google.com and Yahoo. The results were quite consistent.

The #1, #1, #2 and #4 hits in these four searches, respectively, pointed to my very own blog! The search engines were telling me I am the most likely source for an answer to my own question.

The search engines picked up an article about my experiences with Delphi 2006 I wrote in January. I obviously mentioned Delphi 2006. I also talked about installing something, namely Update 1. I also mentioned Windows Vista in my summary of Borland’s road map for Delphi. But I didn’t say anything about installing Delphi 2006 on Vista.

All of the other top 10 search results were like that. They all mentioned the 3 concepts I was searching for (”Delphi 2006″, “install”, and “Vista”), but none said anything about those 3 concepts related to each other (”How do I install Delphi 2006 on Vista”).

The major search engines are very good at finding pages relative to a single concept, but they often fail at producing useful results when I want to find multiple concepts related to each other. The worst situation is when it picks up one concept in the main text of the page, and another in a link in a navigation sidebar (e.g. a page talking about installing Visual Studio on Vista, and a link to the site’s Delphi section in the sidebar). It’s probably difficult for a search engine to figure out that my blog post doesn’t talk about what I was searching for. But excluding navigation sidebars should be relatively easy.

If anyone is trying to compete with MSN, Google, or Yahoo, solving this problem is what would make me switch to your search engine in an instance. Perhaps there simply aren’t any pages explaining how to install Delphi 2006 on Vista. If so, just tell me, so I can quit looking.

Which I ended up doing anyway. If Delphi 2007 runs on Vista that’ll be fine with me. Seems like it might be out before Vista after all, if Borland or the new company keeps the new tradition of releasing next year’s Delphi in the 4th quarter.

At least I got to enjoy my blog being #1 for a search term that people might actually search for. By the time you read this, my new post will probably have taken over the #1 spot. It would be a valid search result, since I did talk about installing Delphi 2006 on Vista, but you won’t learn anything about how to do so.

Thanks to Terry Jepson for dropping me a note that the JGsoft EULA was mentioned in GripeLog. I don’t read GripeLog, but apparently it’s a rather popular forum for griping about everything that’s wrong with the technology industry. It certainly strokes my ego to be mentioned on such a forum in a good way. I’ve posted my reply in several comments below it.

I’ve always felt that software cannot be “just great” unless it comes with great customer service. And good customer service starts with a fair EULA or End-User License Agreement. It’s the first thing you see when you install or run almost any software product. That makes it an essential part of the first impression the product leaves, at least to those people who bother reading the license terms. Given how easy it is to steal software, I’m happy to extend flexible and fair licensing terms to those people who have the decency to pay for the software they use.

I’m also happy to promise free bugfix releases. They’re essential to keeping customers happy anyway, not to mention keeping them recommending our products to everybody they know. Fixing bugs costs time and money, but not nearly as much as acquiring new customers through means other than word-of-mouth. And those new customers would just be as dissappointed about the same bugs. Yes, it does happen that we can’t resolve a problem. For those situations, there’s my personal money-back guarantee.

The new 2006 JGsoft license agreement is even more flexible. PowerGREP 3.2.0 and RegexBuddy 2.2.0 have a new feature “Install on Removable Drive” in the Help menu. The new license agreement for these products specifically allows the software to be used in a portable fashion without extra payment (assuming the number of people using the software remains constant). EditPad Pro and AceText will get the same feature in the coming months.