Month: October 2008

It’s a common complaint of software developers: their customers keep asking for features that already exist.  That’s happened to me more times than I can count, and it used to frustrate me – until I realized I was the problem.  I had designed those features so poorly, or buried them so thoroughly, that they weren’t being noticed.

I bring this up because I keep seeing comments from people saying they’d like to use FeedDemon, but they really need a “sharing” feature like the one Google Reader has.  Or I’ll read a review of FeedDemon that says the lack of a sharing feature is a strike against it.  Which bothers me to no end since FeedDemon has had sharing for quite some time (and NewsGator Online has had it even longer).

The reason so many people miss FeedDemon’s sharing feature isn’t due to “user error,” of course, but because I made it too geeky and too hard to find.  In order to share an article in the current version of FeedDemon, you have to copy it to a “clippings folder” that has an RSS feed – and as you can see, it’s far from obvious how to do this:

1. Create a clippings folder
2. Choose to share it as an RSS feed
3. Click an obscure icon under the article’s headline to display a menu of clippings folders
4. Choose the clippings folder you want to copy the article to

Not exactly the simplest approach, huh?

So I decided to rectify this in the upcoming FeedDemon 2.8 by adding a single, obvious “Share” link – which is how I should’ve done it in the first place.

Simply click “Share,” and FeedDemon will copy the article to your shared clippings.  New users who don’t have any shared clippings (and probably don’t know what they are) can still use this feature, because it takes care of configuring everything without all the “geek speak” of the current version.

PS: I hope to release a public beta of FeedDemon 2.8 within the next 10 days.

If you haven’t had enough of a preview of FeedDemon’s upcoming tagging features, then check out this guest post I wrote for the NewsGator Widgets Blog.

“One of the more challenging tasks developers face — regardless of whether they develop desktop applications, web applications or even widgets — is designing a feature in a way that not only hides the technical details, but also respects the end user by not asking them to do too much work.”

I talk about how adding a feature requires thinking about the extra work you’d require of your customers if you don’t design it correctly, with FeedDemon’s tagging features used as examples.