waffle

(Prelude: Do you remember a few years back, when Windows Vista was known as Longhorn and was in early development, when Windows XP and Outlook had been ran over time and time again by security bugs and when Microsoft decided that it was time to do something about it? As an offshoot of the security cleansing, and no doubt to sell more licenses of something with the word “Enterprise” in its name, Microsoft and some other industry players established the concept of Trusted Computing. In this soup there were nuggets of useful concepts, like running as a non-Administrator and bringing encryption to the masses about five years after most people who cared enough already adopted it, but most of it became an umbrella name and a reason to start locking down the computing experience. Just look at the Orwellian “Genuine Advantage” DRM.)

One of my applications lets you search the web or sites, and it comes loaded with four search engines, one of which is Google. As you type, results and query suggestions are delivered from Google by default. On a regular basis, I get messages from people wondering if they will be able to use it without sending any data to Google. (I let them know that if they disable these options, they can.) That’s one example of the kind of support questions I get for one of my four pieces of software, and some are more technical detail than that.

I’ve been thinking for a long time about publishing, inspired by those inquiries and other events, some sort of network footprint for each of my products. Tonight I did something about this on a slightly bigger scale; I made two test “tech profiles”. They list the network habits, how hard it is to install, get support, what other parts are used, which document types are supported and to what extent, how it works with stuff like AppleScript, Automator, VoiceOver, Quick Look and Spotlight, the feasibility for Time Machine on your app’s data, where temporary files and application data are stored, and so on — I have ideas for even more information. I’d like to hear your honest opinions on this kind of idea.

Here’s the case I make for it: obviously, some of these things come up. If someone sent me an email asking me about it, I’d definitely answer. I don’t want to drown people in answers to questions they didn’t ask, but out of respect to the people who use my software, and from personal experience, I think it’d be nice to preemptively collect this information on a single page. I almost called this a scorecard, but that’s not the idea; the idea is to make it easier for people to trust what is offered. There’s that word again…

It would be wrong to say that I don’t make money off of those applications. (Some kind soul left me $5 in donations earlier, and I just turned down an offer for consultation in a related area.) But I don’t make it for the money. Yet I have respect for, and am grateful for, everyone who uses my software. I think one of the best ways to demonstrate that is to be upfront with what you are offering, and that could manifest itself as a listing like this.