Nobody likes getting an email message telling that that the end result of all their hard work is a piece of garbage (or worse). It is a bit of a shock, when it happens the first time. One negative piece of feedback can easily offset 10 positive ones. But, hurt feelings aside, it may not be all bad.
For a start, that person actually cared enough about your product to take the time to contact you. That is not something to be taken lightly. A large number of products fail because they solve a problem that no-one cares about. Apathy is very hard to iterate on. At least you are getting some feedback. Assuming the comments aren’t completely toxic, it might be worth replying. Sometimes you can turn someone who really hates your software into a fan. Like one of those romantic comedies where an odd couple who really dislike each other end up falling in love. Indifference is much harder to work with. The people who don’t care about your product enough to communicate with you, are the dark matter of business. Non-interacting. Mysterious. Unknowable.
Negative emails may also contain a kernal of useful information, if you can look past their, sometimes less than diplomatic, phrasing. I remember having the user interface of an early version of PerfectTablePlan torn apart in a forum. Once I put my wounded pride to one side, I could see they had a point and I ended up designing a much better user interface.
In some cases the person contacting you might just be having a bad day. Their car broke down. They are going through a messy divorce. The boss shouted at them. Your product just happened to be the nearest cat they could kick. Don’t take it personally. You need a thick skin if you are to survive in business.
But sometimes there is a fundamental clash between how someone sees the world vs the model of the world embodied in your product. I once got so angry with Microsoft Project, due to this sort of clash of weltanschauung, that I came close to throwing the computer out of a window. So I understand how frustrating this can be. In this case, it is just the wrong product for them. If they have bought a licence, refund them and move on.
While polarisation is bad for society, it can good for a product. Consider a simple thought experiment. A large number of products are competing for sales in a market. Bland Co’s product is competent but unexciting. It is in everyone’s top 10, but no-one’s first choice. Exciting Co’s product is more polarizing, last choice for many, but first choice for some. Which would you rather be? Exiting Co, surely? No-one buys their second choice. Better to be selling Marmite than one of ten types of nearly identical peanut butter. So don’t be too worried about doing things that polarize opinion. For example, I think it is amusing to use a skull and crossbones icon in my seating software to show that 2 people shouldn’t be sat together. Some people have told me that they really like this. Others have told me it is ‘unprofessional’. I’m not going to change it.
Obviously we would like everyone to love our products as much as we do. But that just isn’t going to happen. You can’t please all of the people, all of the time. And, if you try, you’ll probably ending pleasing no-one. Some of the people, most of the time is probably the best you can hope for.
Visual programming tools (also called ‘no-code’ or ‘low-code’) have been getting a lot of press recently. This, in turn, has generated a lot of discussion about whether visual or text based programming (coding) is ‘best’. As someone who uses text programming (C++) to create a visual programming data wrangling tool (Easy Data Transform) I have some skin in this game and have thought about it quite a bit.
At some level, everything is visual. Text is still visual (glyphs). By visual programming here I specifically mean software that allows you to program using nodes (boxes) and vertexes (arrows), laid out on a virtual canvas using drag and drop.
A famous example of this sort of drag and drop visual programming is Yahoo Pipes:
But there are many others, including my own Easy Data Transform:
Note that I’m not talking about Excel, Scratch or drag and drop GUI designers. Although some of the discussion might apply to them.
By text programming, I mean mainstream programming languages such as Python, Javascript or C++, and associated tools. Here is the QtCreator Interactive Development Environment (IDE) that I use to write C++ in, to create Easy Data Transform:
The advantages of visual programming are:
Intuitive. Humans are very visual creatures. A lot of our brain is given over to visual processing and our visual processing bandwidth is high. Look at pretty much any whiteboard, at any company, and there is a good chance you will see boxes and arrows. Even in non-techie companies.
Quicker to get started. Drag and drop tools can allow you to start solving problems in minutes.
Higher level abstractions. Which means you can work faster (assuming they are the right abstractions).
Less hidden state. The connections between nodes are shown on screen, rather than you having to build an internal model in your own memory.
Less configuration. The system components work together without modification.
No syntax to remember. Which means it is less arcane for people who aren’t experienced programmers.
Less run-time errors, because the system generally won’t let you do anything invalid. You don’t have to worry about getting function names or parameter ordering and types right.
Immediate feedback on every action. No need to compile and run.
The advantages of text programming are:
Denser representation of information.
Greater flexibility. Easier to do things like looping and recursion.
Better tooling. There is a vast ecosystem of tools for manipulating text, such as editors and version control systems.
Less lock-in. You can generally move your C++ or Python code from one IDE to another without much problem.
More opportunities for optimization. Because you have lower-level access there is more scope to optimize speed and/or memory as required.
The advantages and disadvantages of each are two sides of the same coin. A higher level of abstraction makes things simpler, but also reduces the expressiveness and flexibility. The explicit showing of connections can make things clearer, but can also increase on-screen clutter.
The typical complaints you hear online about visual programming systems are:
It makes 95% of things easy and 5% of things impossible
Visual programming systems are not as flexible. However many visual programming systems will let you drop down into text programming, when required, to implement that additional 5%.
Jokes aside, I think this hybrid approach does a lot to combine the strengths of both approaches.
It doesn’t scale to complex systems
Managing complex systems has been much improved over the years in text programming, using techniques such as hierarchy and encapsulation. But there is no reason these same techniques can’t also be applied to visual programming.
It isn’t high enough performance
The creators of a visual programming system are making a lot of design decisions for you. If you need to tune a system for high performance on a particular problem, then you probably need the low level control that text based programming allows. But with most problems you probably don’t care if it takes a few extra seconds to run, if you can do the programming in a fraction of the time. Also, a lot of visual programming systems are pretty fast. Easy Data Transform can join 2 one million row datasets on a laptop in ~5 seconds, which is faster than base R.
I’m sure we’ve all seen examples of spaghetti diagrams. But you can also create horrible spaghetti code with text programming. Also, being able to immediately see that a visual program has been sloppily constructed might serve as a useful cue.
If you are careful to layout your nodes, you can keep things manageable (ravioli, rather than spaghetti). But it starts to become tricky when you have 50+ nodes with a moderate to high degree of connectivity, especially if there is no support for hierarchy (nodes within nodes).
Automatic layout of graphs for easier comprehension (e.g. to minimize line crossings) is hard (NP-complete, in the same class of problems as the ‘travelling salesman’).
No support for versioning
It is possible to version visual programming tools if they store the information in a text based file (e.g XML). Trying to diff raw XML isn’t ideal, but some visual based programming tools do have built-in diff and merge tools.
It isn’t searchable
There is no reason why visual programming tools should not be searchable.
Too much mousing
Professional programmers love their keyboard shortcuts. But there is no reason why visual programming tools can’t also make good use of keyboard shortcuts.
Vendor lock-in
Many visual programming tools are proprietary, which means the cost can be high for switching from one to another. So, if you are going to invest time and/or money heavily in a visual programming tool, take time to make a good choice and consider how you could move away from it if you need to. If you are doing quick and dirty one-offs to solve a particular problem that you don’t need to solve again, then this doesn’t really matter.
‘No code’ just means ‘someone else’s code’
If you are using Python+Pandas or R instead of Easy Data Transform, then you are also balancing on top of an enormous pile of someone else’s code.
We are experts, we don’t need no stinkin drag and drop
If you are an experienced text programmer, then you aren’t really the target market for these tools. Easy Data Transform is aimed at the analyst or business guy trying to wrangle a motley collection of Excel and CSV files, not the professional data scientist who dreams in R or Pandas. However even a professional code jockey might find visual tools faster for some jobs.
Both visual and text programming have their places. Visual programming is excellent for exploratory work and prototyping. Text based programming is almost always a better choice for experts creating production systems where performance is important. When I want to analyse some sales data, I use Easy Data Transform. But when I work on Easy Data Transform itself, I use C++.
Text programming is more mature than visual programming. FORTRAN appeared in the 1950s. Applications with graphical user interfaces only started becoming mainstream in the 1980s. Some of the shortcomings with visual programming reflect it’s relative lack of maturity and I think we can expect to see continued improvements in the tooling associated with visual programming.
Visual programming works best in specific domains, such as:
3d graphics and animations
image processing
audio processing
game design
data wrangling
These domains tend to have:
A single, well defined data type. Such as a table of data (dataframe) for data wrangling.
Well defined abstractions. Such as join, to merge 2 tables of data using a common key column.
A relatively straightforward control flow. Typically a step-by-step pipeline, without loops, recursion or complex control flow.
Visual programming has been much less successful when applied to generic programming, where you need lots of different data types, a wide range of abstractions and potentially complex control flow.
I’ve been a professional software developer since 1987. People (mostly in marketing) have talked about replacing code and programmers with point and click tools for much of that time. That is clearly not going to happen. Text programming is the best approach for some kinds of problems and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But domain-specific visual programming can be very powerful and has a much lower barrier to entry. Visual programming empowers people to do things that might be out of their reach with text programming and might never get done if they have to wait for the IT department to do it.
So, unsurprisingly, the answer to ‘which is better?’ is very much ‘it depends’. Both have their place and neither is going away.
Winterfest 2023 is on. Loads of quality software for Mac and Windows from independent vendors, at a discount. This includes my own Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan, which are on sale with a 25% discount.
This sounds like a question a programmer might ask after one medicinal cigarette too many. The computer science equivalent of “what is the sounds of one hand clapping?”. But it is a question I have to decide the answer to.
I am adding indexOf() and lastIndexOf() operations to the Calculate transform of my data wrangling (ETL) software (Easy Data Transform). This will allow users to find the offset of one string inside another, counting from the start or the end of the string. Easy Data Transform is written in C++ and uses the Qt QString class for strings. There are indexOf() and lastIndexOf() methods for QString, so I thought this would be an easy job to wrap that functionality. Maybe 15 minutes to program it, write a test case and document it.
Obviously it wasn’t that easy, otherwise I couldn’t be writing this blog post.
First of all, what is the index of “a” in “abc”? 0, obviously. QString( “abc” ).indexOf( “a” ) returns 0. Duh. Well only if you are a (non-Fortran) programmer. Ask a non-programmer (such as my wife) and they will say: 1, obviously. It is the first character. Duh. Excel FIND( “a”, “abc” ) returns 1.
Ok, most of my customers, aren’t programmers. I can use 1 based indexing.
But then things get more tricky.
What is the index of an empty string in “abc”? 1 maybe, using 1-based indexing or maybe empty is not a valid value to pass.
What is the index of an empty string in an empty string? Hmm. I guess the empty string does contain an empty string, but at what index? 1 maybe, using 1-based indexing, except there isn’t a first position in the string. Again, maybe empty is not a valid value to pass.
I looked at the Qt C++ QString, Javascript string and Excel FIND() function for answers. But they each give different answers and some of them aren’t even internally consistent. This is a simple comparison of the first index or last index of text v1 in text v2 in each (Excel doesn’t have an equivalent of lastIndexOf() that I am aware of):
Changing these to make the all the valid results 1-based and setting invalid results to -1, for easy comparison:
So:
Javascript disagrees with C++ QString and Excel on whether the first index of an empty string in an empty string is valid.
Javascript disagrees with C++ QString on whether the last index of an empty string in a non-empty string is the index of the last character or 1 after the last character.
C++ QString thinks the first index of an empty string in an empty string is the first character, but the last index of an empty string in an empty string is invalid.
It seems surprisingly difficult to come up with something intuitive and consistent! I think I am probably going to return an error message if either or both values are empty. This seems to me to be the only unambiguous and consistent approach.
I could return a 0 for a non-match or when one or both values are empty, but I think it is important to return different results in these 2 different cases. Also, not found and invalid feel qualitatively different to a calculated index to me, so shouldn’t be just another number. What do you think?
*** Update 14-Dec-2023 ***
I’ve been around the houses a bit more following feedback on this blog, the Easy Data Transform forum and hacker news and this what I have decided:
IndexOf() v1 in v2:
v1
v2
IndexOf(v1,v2)
1
aba
aba
1
a
a
1
a
aba
1
x
y
world
hello world
7
This is the same as Excel FIND() and differs from Javascript indexOf() (ignoring the difference in 0 or 1 based indexing) only for “”.indexOf(“”) which returns -1 in Javascript.
LastIndexOf() v1 in v2:
v1
v2
LastIndexOf(v1,v2)
1
aba
aba
4
a
a
1
a
aba
3
x
y
world
hello world
7
This differs from Javascript lastIndexOf() (ignoring difference in 0 or 1 based indexing) only for “”.indexOf(“”) which returns -1 in Javascript.
Conceptually the index is the 1-based index of the first (IndexOf) or last (LastIndexOf) position where, if the V1 is removed from the found position, it would have to be re-inserted in order to revert to V2. Thanks to layer8 on Hacker News for clarifying this.
Javascript and C++ QString return an integer and both use -1 as a placeholder value. But Easy Data Transform is returning a string (that can be interpreted as a number, depending on the transform) so we aren’t bound to using a numeric value. So I have left it blank where there is no valid result.
Now I’ve spent enough time down this rabbit hole and need to get on with something else! If you don’t like it you can always add an If with Calculate or use a Javascript transform to get the result you prefer.
*** Update 15-Dec-2023 ***
Quite a bit of debate on this topic on Hacker News.
Summerfest 2023 is on. Loads of quality software for Mac and Windows from independent vendors, at a discount. This includes my own Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan, which are on sale with a 25% discount.
This is a guest post from fellow software developer, Simon Kravis.
It’s sometimes said that software development is only 10% of what’s required to earn money from software and I can attest to that. Since 2018 I have been developing photo captioning and related software, more as a retirement diversion than a serious source of income (after a career mostly involved in writing scientific and engineering analysis software), in the hope that sales income would at least cover running costs. My best marketing tool has been writing reviews of the class of software that I produce, and the hosting site (Hub Pages) provides some useful analytics on how often these are accessed and for how long. Below is the graph for an article on tagging.
The decline since early 2022 is hard to explain – the article is periodically updated so the steady decline is not due to diminishing ‘freshness’ – which for Google is probably a file Modified date.
Here is another review article profile (Scanning Multiple Photos) showing a similar decline:
But another (Best Photo Captioning Software) has held up, though at a low level.
I offer digital photo captioning software (Caption Pro) on Windows and Mac platforms, and an iPhone captioning app (CaptionEdit), with the Windows version dating back to 2017. I also offer part of the functionality of Caption Pro on Windows for auto-cropping scans of multiple paper photos (ImageSplit). On Windows neither Caption Pro software downloads or sales seem to correlate with review accesses, despite about 1/3 of web site accesses coming from the review. However, downloads do show some correlation with Caption Pro web site sessions, as shown in the graph below.
Sales do not correlate with downloads, which perhaps explains why most advertising for niche products is not successful – it may increase downloads but this does not appear to increase sales. The observed proportion of downloads resulting in sales for ImageSplit and Caption Pro are 6% and 9% respectively. The lack of correlation between sales and downloads may be due to the small number of sales per month, which results in random fluctuation dominating the results.
The decision to enter the Apple “Walled Garden” of software was partly at the prompting of friends rather than a commercial evaluation. Apple Developer membership (costing ~US$100 per year) is required to prevent software being blocked from installation through being from an unknown publisher. Further costs were purchasing a fairly modern Mac on which to perform development, as the App Store will only accept software developed using recent versions of the Xcode development environment, which will only run on fairly recent hardware. The App Store takes a commission of 15% on sales, which is quite reasonable when compared to the difficulty of implementing e-commerce on Windows, where a PayPal account eases the problem of low-value foreign-currency transactions, but e-commerce plug-ins may stop working after years for no discernible reason. The review process for software acceptance into the App Store is generally fast, but seemly trivial issues can require resubmission. Features which have passed one review may be rejected in a later one. The review process is generally fast, but on one occasion took 4 weeks.
Caption Pro for Mac has been available (via the App Store) only since Sep 2021.It appears within the top 6 results for a search using “Caption Photos”, which is the source for most downloads. About 3.5% of downloads result in sales. This figure is much less than the Windows version of the same app, despite Mac users’ reputation for being more willing to pay for software. The iPhone app did not appear at all initially when searching for “Caption Photos” in the App Store. After 6 months it began appearing as result number 140, after it had 360 downloads. This poor ranking performance is probably because “Caption Photos” is a very popular keyword used by many apps, including those that only caption videos. It has had very few downloads and sales, despite Apple Search Ads and Apptimizer campaigns. The number of downloads increased dramatically during the Apptimizer campaign between Jan 24 and Feb 2 (as they were purchased) but the change in ranking from these downloads did not result in any sales, perhaps because no installs were purchased. The Apple search ads campaign (which resulted in the app being shown as an ad 1 in 50 times when the search phrase “Caption Photos” was used) did not greatly affect downloads or sales. A Facebook ad campaign to show a link to the app whenever “Genealogy” or “Genealogy Software” was searched for was also unsuccessful, and very expensive, as Facebook charges by impressions rather than clicks. Additional backlinks to the web site were purchased in September 2022 from Links Management in an attempt to improve the web site Google ranking, but this did not appear to have any effect on web traffic.
Mac and Windows users contacting me with problems have had a wide range of experience level – from completely naïve to former programmers. Most have been from the US, which reflects the geographic distribution of sales. There have many downloads to non-English speaking countries but very few sales.
Some results from the Mac and iPhone Apps are shown below:
On balance, developing for Apple platforms was not a good commercial decision, as the advantages of a mostly captive audience (completely captive in the case of the iPhone) do not seem to result in higher rates of downloads or sales. Competition for iPhone apps is so intense that niche products without massive advertising budgets are unlikely to succeed. The same is likely to apply to Android phone apps, which anecdotally have a less rigorous review process. My experience is that advertising and backlink purchase for any platform are not effective in increasing sales for niche software.
Simon Kravis runs Aleka Consulting, a small software and consultancy company in Canberra, Australia specializing in information management and offering a number of software products. He has mainly developed scientific and engineering programs, starting in the era of paper tape.
Back in 2011 I created eventcountdown.com. It had a snazzy downloadable, PerfectTablePlan-branded countdown clock for Windows and web-based countdown clock with ads for PerfectTablePlan. Both free. The idea was people searching for countdown clocks for events (such as their wedding) would find the site via Google, find out about PerfectTablePlan and a certain percentage would then buy my event seating planner software.
I paid other people to create the Windows and web versions of the countdown clock. The web-based clock was updated from time to time to add pre-built countdowns for events like superbowl, the olympics, christmas, thanksgiving etc. And I fielded the occasional support emails related to the Windows countdown clock.
This is the total traffic to the site from 2011 to 2023:
The peaks are mostly due to superbowl. The site got 38k hits in a single day just before superbowl 2019! The free Windows countdown clock also drew quite a lot of traffic. In total the site got some 1.7 million page views over 12 years. Only a small percentage of these visitors clicked through to PerfectTablePlan.com, but still a useful number. Perhaps some people were also prompted to investigate PerfectTablePlan by the branding on the downloadable clock. The site might have also had some SEO benefits for PerfectTablePlan.com. Who knows.
The eventcountdown.com website is now gone (the domain redirects to PerfectTablePlan.com). It didn’t seem worth the effort to keep adding events to the web countdown clock with the traffic now so low. Also both the website and windows clock were looking dated. But I think it was a worthwhile investment of my time and money.
I have also created various other contents pages and mini-sites over the years: articles on table planning, font collections, free clipart, place card templates etc. You can see similar trajectories for some of those.
The traffic seems to reach a peak after 3-7 years and then slowly decay away. Although I have shown them with the same vertical scale here, some generated a lot more traffic than others.
I did some basic on-page SEO for these content pages. For example, looking at Adwords keyword data to choose the page title and H1. But nothing beyond that. No paid promotion or backlink building campaigns.
I tried paying people to write articles related to events. But none of these ever generated any worthwhile traffic. Google could somehow smell the insincerity.
For my data cleaning software product I have been concentrating on ‘how to’ pages and supporting videos aimed at specific topics. These are intended to both help existing customers and to attract new traffic. For example, how to clean data. I have also been posting these videos on the Easy Data Transform YouTube channel. The numbers of hits monthly on the Youtube videos are relatively low, but they are quite targeted and hopefully will be generating traffic for years to come.
So content marketing take-aways based on my experience are:
Free content can be a useful way to bring free traffic to your website.
The amount of traffic you get is quite hit and miss. Some content has generated a lot more traffic than expected, some a lot less.
The content needs to be well targeted if you want to have any chance of converting it to sales.
Google will grow bored of it eventually. You might be able to increase the longevity by updating the content. I’ve not been very diligent with this, but even neglected content pages can generate useful traffic over 10+ year lifespan.
The authenticode digital certificate I bought back in 2019 expired recently, so I had to get a new certificate (you can’t renew a certificate, as such, you just need to buy a new one). A few months before the expiry I emailed KSoftware.net, who I had bought previous digital certificates from and with whom I had always had a good experience in the past. No reply. I tried a couple more times, including the personal email of Mitchell, the founder. Nothing. Someone else told me they had had similar experiences. Their recent trustpilot ratings are a horror show. And the copyright date on their website is ‘2003 – 2021’. But they were still advertising on Google Adwords. I have no idea what is happening here. If you are reading this Mitchell, I hope you are ok.
With KSoftware out of the picture I looked elsewhere. Eventually I ended up buying a new Sectigo certificate from signmycode.com. I partly chose them because they offered a 5 year certficate and the less often I have to go through the ball ache of a getting a new certificate, the better. The experience was decidely mixed.
The good:
The prices seem reasonable, compared to other options.
Support was responsive. English didn’t appear to be their first language, but it was good enough.
I got my new certificate within a few days and have had no issues with it so far. The change in certificate seems to be set off a few customer’s anti-virus software, but that was to be expected.
The mediocre:
The online guidance and documentation on the process was mediocre, at best.
I was a bit confused about whether I had to click ‘Buy now’ or ‘Renew now’. It seems this is more marketing/SEO purposes and it doesn’t matter which you click.
I had to send them a photo of me holding a government ID. This felt pretty uncomfortable, but might be something mandated by the certificate companies.
The bad:
After I got my certificate I checked the expiry date and it was only 3 years. When I queried this I was rold that the ‘5 year certificate’ I thought I had bought is not a 5 year certificate. It is a 3 year certificate, then I have to apply for a new pre-paid 2 year certificate in 3 years time.
This is what you see when you click on ‘Buy now’:
When you see this, wouldn’t you expect to get a single 5 year certificate? If there was anything explaining that this was 2 separate certificates, I didn’t notice it. It certainly didn’t mention it on their home page. This feels deceptive to me.
Who knows if this company will still be there in 3 years time? I emailed them and told them I wanted to keep the new 3 year certificate and for them to refund the 2 year certificate. They said they would only refund the entire order and then I would have to start the whole process all over again. They also claimed:
“renewal validation is much more easy then buying a new certificate as most of the validation part is getting carry forward.”
Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan Professional edition are both on sale for 25% off at Winterfest 2022. So now might be a good time to give them a try (both have free trials). There is also some other great products from other small vendors on sale, including Tinderbox, Scrivener and Devonthink. Some of the software is Mac only, but Easy Data Transform and Hyper Plan are available for both Mac and Windows (one license covers both OSs).
You need your hosting company, payment processor and other critical suppliers to be rock solid. Think twice about going with a supplier just because they are cheap. Changing suppliers can be a pain, so ask around before trying a supplier.
Use version control for everything important
It matters less which version control system it is. Periodically making a copy of your source folder is not a version control system!
Don’t promise ship dates
Developers are notoriously bad at predicting dates. If you promise a date and get it wrong (and you will) then you either have to miss the date or cut corners. Neither is good.
Never send an email you might later regret
If you are starting to feel angry writing an email, then stop writing. Come back to it later. Or maybe write it, feel a bit better, then delete it without sending.
Write documentation as you go
Few people enjoy writing documentation. But if you leave all the documentation until you have finished programming, then you are likely to rush it and forget stuff.
Have a checklist
Automate where you can. Have checklists for everything else. Keep updating your checklists.
Get someone else to proof read everything
Typos are embarrassing, but it is impossible to proof read your own stuff. So get someone else to proof read any stuff that customers see: web pages, newsletters, documentation etc.
Never release changes just before going on holiday
You don’t want to have to be fire-fighting a new bug when you should be on the beach with your family/friends.
Don’t try to do everything yourself
You could spend weeks learning about taxes, web hosting, CSS or any number of other topics that aren’t central to your business. But why bother? Pay someone who already know this stuff.
Embrace imperfection
If you wait for perfection, then you are never going to ship anything. Just make sure each release is better than the last. Good enough is good enough.
Successful Software 