There are two parts to today’s announcements.
Part Un: Flow 1.0.2 Now Available
This new release of Flow fixes a myriad of issues, increases stability, and clarifies a few user interface paradigms. For more details, feel free to read the release notes.
Coincidentally, it was roughly 1 month ago that 1.0.1 was released. As a few have pointed out to me, nearly a month between bug-fix releases is rather abnormal — this is mostly due to the massiveness of these updates.
Would you prefer it if Extendmac released smaller updates in a more frequent fashion?
I’m really interested to know the general opinion on this, so I strongly encourage you to let me know via the comments. 
Part Deux: Feedback Ideas
Since April 4th of this year, I’ve been wondering about the best way to handle customer feedback. At the moment, our support system is as follows:
- You e-mail us.
- If it’s support, it’s answered within 2 or 3 days, sometimes sooner.
- If it’s a bug report, it’s queued to be fixed, or marked as a duplicate if it’s already been filed. When it’s fixed, we’ll let you know, and point you toward the nightly release to confirm that we’ve fixed your issue.
- If it’s a feature request, we’ll follow up with dialogue if it’s something that necessitates it.
This is a nice system, no doubt, but I think it can be better. I don’t like that:
- Support is a closed-system. Because there is no mechanism for browsing past cases on the customer’s part, you guys can’t find instant-answers to issues that, chances are, someone else has already run into, and chances are, we’ve already answered.
- Some people hesitate to report bugs and/or features because they simply assume that someone else has already reported it. Right now, there’s no way for you guys to know what has already been reported.
Cumulatively, I think the problem with support today is that the collective body of information about/for Flow doesn’t grow as you invest time into giving feedback, and Extendmac invests time into addressing it. I’ve got a few ideas rolling around about how to fix this. Most notably, I think we need a system that:
- Allows users to submit feedback, specifying an explicit preference as to whether or not the case is to remain private or public. From experience, I think that most cases are generic enough (e.g. “Doing this causes Flow to crash.”) to be safely public.
- Provides an intuitive and simple way to effectively discover whether or not your feedback (bug/feature/support) has already been addressed. If it has, the system should allow you to let us know, in a single click, that “I have this issue too,” which effectively gives us a *far* better idea of what to address first.
In any event, this is most certainly not going to be a system that’s implemented quickly, but it’s something I’d like to see a dialogue start about. As I’ve mentioned previously, Extendmac is a rather transparent company (we’ve got nothing to hide), and this type of dialogue really counts.
This entry was posted
on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 and is filed under News.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
