A couple of days ago, I wrote to extol the virtues of supportive users whose valuable feedback helps make software better for everyone. I decided to omit mentioning my pet hate, which is people who take the time to post terrible reviews of your software on download web sites without bothering to take the time to get in touch with you first. I should have, because a couple of days afterwards it happened again.

Take this review on MacUpdate:

My Podcast feed is up on my server and I’m now at episode 12, so I know the feed is alright and works, however when having feeder download the xml file it will always fail.

Such a shame, I looked like a useful piece of software. (8/18/2005, Version: 1.2)

…. and 1 star for everything: Features, Ease of Use, Value and Stability.

Developers don’t get notified when people post reviews of their software, although both VersionTracker and MacUpdate have recently started providing RSS feeds for your products’ ratings. These are only updated when the rating changes, some people post comments without ratings and in all cases you have no way of getting in touch with the reviewer personally to try to get to the bottom of it. Indie developers need to have a thick skin about this stuff and as such I don’t always reply, but this one was so petty that I did:

There could be lots of reasons for this: the feed could be invalid or the wrong format, the URL entered could be incorrect and it could be a bug, but since it works for most people it’s obviously something peculiar to your feed.

Unless people get in touch with developers about problems like this, there is no way of us knowing and thus no way the situation will be remedied.

Also, this is clearly a convenience feature and hardly sums up the entire functionality of the application.

It does indeed work most of the time, but I know of a few things that prevent Feeder from downloading feeds that I’m fixing in Feeder 1.2.1:

• Feeder can’t seem to decode the compressed feed returned by FeedBurner right now. Update: It turns out that no matter what you try to set for the Accept-Encoding HTTP header when using NSURLRequest, it will be ignored and “gzip, deflate” sent instead. I’ve reworked much of Feeder’s feed autodetection and download code for 1.2.1 and somewhere along the line have solved the problem of dealing with compressed data. Thanks also to Eric (see comments) for getting in touch.
• iTunes feeds with invalid iTunes categories can’t be read by Feeder 1.2.
• Feeder can’t always autodetect feeds on non-XHTML web pages.

I only know about these problems because people have got in touch, I have quick and easy workarounds for anyone who falls foul of them right now. Maybe if this person had done the same I would have another thing on my list and they would have a workaround.

If their feed was invalid I would have fixed it by hand and sent it back – Feeder can’t parse invalid XML because Apple’s XML parser bales out, but that’s perfectly reasonable. Ironically, Apple’s own iTunes is pretty liberal about this stuff, much to the horror of the people out there who care, because it helps propagate exactly these sorts of problems. Also Feeder can’t parse RSS 1.0 (RDF) or Atom feeds because they are completely different formats to RSS 0.9x and 2.0.

If anyone has a problem with Feeder, they can send feedback from my site or within the app and be assured of a quick response, often within the hour and usually no later than 24 hours. Unlike an anonymous comment on a download site, that really does help everyone.

Always after a big and hectic release, such as Feeder 1.2 at the end of last month, there is tons to be done. I always say to myself that I’ll try to take a few days off to restore sanity and I’m lucky if I get a single day of a weekend. Of course time is spent promoting the new release and there is Real Life, where I need to catch up with all those things that have needed doing, but I couldn’t find time or inclination. I also have to reacquaint myself with friends and make time with my family – not that it’s work, but sometimes you need total downtime.

So, immediately after a release is actually the worst time to consider a break, no matter if you think you need one. Inevitably support emails and other feedback floods in – a lot of this can be positive comment, which is fantastic and I always try to respond. While most of the rest can be dealt with quickly requiring no fixes, two things persist in being big issues with Feeder.

FTP remains the thing that needs the most support due to the myriad differences between various systems, configurations and user understanding. That is hotly followed by people needing help with their feeds, almost always malformed or invalid feeds from other applications. I do my best to make these things easier and Feeder has a host of features to filter out crap. There are improvements I can make to the way Feeder works with different FTP configurations, but I doubt the invalid RSS issues will go away in a hurry. Top tip: if you have a feed on your site, check it out with FeedValidator. You’d be surprised at the applications and systems that have problems.

I should mention that the people who write in with support queries can’t be more helpful. They’re always willing to answer questions and try stuff out. I simply don’t have the resources to test every configuration of every FTP server, for example, so in the world of Indieware it is these people who help make products and life better for everyone. Whether it’s questions on how something should work or positive feedback, it all helps developers to know what’s good and where improvements could be made. I think all good developers agree with this. Here’s to you, Mac-using community!

To anyone who, like me, reads and enjoys sometime Reinvented Software helper Hans Kim’s blog, Post Hog, Ergo Propter Hoc, it has moved to http://nsobject.blogspot.com. I eagerly await the repost of “Das Hans Idyll”.

ThinkMac‘s Rory Prior has written a couple of posts on his blog about his disappointment with the Apple Mighty Mouse. Its touch sensitivity means you have to lift your index finger off the mouse in order to right-click, amongst other annoyances. Latest post here.

That’s a shame because I quite liked the idea of a mouse that didn’t look like you needed 12 fingers to operate it and had some extra OS X features of its own. Of course you can do all this stuff with other mice (mouses?), but you’d expect to see a Mighty Mouse bundled with new Macs in the not-too-distant and this isn’t going to be good enough.

Anyway, Rory has saved me £40 for the time being, so cheers! 😉

Apologies if anyone has tried to post comments on this blog recently and found them vanishing into thin air. I think I added a word to my comments blacklist that caused comments to get nuked. I didn’t realise it could work on a partial word match, not the whole thing.

Also, I’ve had a few occasions where emails sent to info [at] this domain alias don’t seem to have reached me – I only know about these because people write in again and it works. I usually answer all emails ASAP, usually immediately and almost always within 24 hours, so if you’ve sent an email to that address expecting a reply and not received one, please write in again to steve [at] this domain.

I don’t know why this is happening, but I suspect it’s something to do with the alias. Most the time, it seems to work well.