Thursday, June 05, 2008

Gesture Magic's Criticism

Whilst software I give away on this site usually has praise (Aerofoil being a good example, LocateMe for its educational value, Optimizer for having been a best seller when it was sold) I've recently come across (my first piece!) some criticism of Gesture Magic. Bear in mind Gesture Magic was stated on here (due to time constraints) to be released with a limited feature set because it was better than sitting on my machine not getting used or not getting improved by third party developers, so I did expect some criticism.

What irks me is that the criticism was not constructive, it was left on a third party site and no feedback left for me here.

Even if the user cannot program, lack of simple etiquette to provide some useful feedback of the software on this site shows the lack of understanding of the open source process and how developers rely on feedback to improve the product. This is the cost of the product. You pay Microsoft with money, for open source for whom people who give their own time writing software for others, it's good practice to provide help or feedback. It's all about community, sharing and importantly goodwill.

To summarise my feedback on this issue, based on the intentional simplistic design of Gesture Magic, once I've finished the Nintendo DS game I'm working on, I intend to
- Improve accessor/modifier keys on Gesture Magic (find some other way to start the gesture drawing)
- Improve application starting (add start in directory option)
- Provide integrated default functions, such as minimise/maximise window, close Window, and search.
- Better help support
- Fix or improve some of the issues raised by users.

At least the user said Gesture Magic makes your desktop look like a video game, which was an intention all along :)

4 comments:

Anne said...

Hi Ben,

You know I visit your site semi frequently and I think speak on behalf of some of your software users in saying we appreciate the work you do. Keep it up and don't get disheartened because of some fleeting unsupported criticism.

Anonymous said...

hi ben,

go forward and please succeed with gesture magic!

as i was a (fan-)user from strokeit (your 3rd party criticism) under xp, i was left alone without gestures under vista now.
so, i hope you get the time to produce such an excellent program in vista like strokeit was in xp.

i like your idea to give a (workers-) monitor the look of a video game.

markus

Anonymous said...

You've made a stylish and good performing gesture program here. I'll keep my eye out for updates as I use gestures for mouse-only control (i.e. right click and draw) which I don't think is possible at present. I like the plans for the updates though.
You're doing the world a favour with free software here so don't take the criticism to heart ;)

Benjamin said...

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback. If you want to see any specific features leave a message on a Gesture Magic post (like this one) and I'll see if I can fit them in.

Benjamin