TITLE: Agile Moments: Predicting What Users Want
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 27, 2012 12:08 PM
DESC: 
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In
<A HREF="http://www.macstories.net/msinterviews/macstories-interviews-gus-mueller/">
   this MacStories interview</A>,
Gus Mueller talks about the response to his latest release of
<A HREF="http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad/">
   VoodooPad</A>.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
Interest in VoodooPad 5 far surpassed my expectations for it.
I know that VoodooPad has a lot of fans out there, but I guess
I just hadn't heard from them in a while.

People really seem to like the Markdown syntax support and the
new JavaScript events system I've built in for customization.
I also added ePub export to VP5 which I expected more interest
in -- but that hasn't seem to materialized.  I'm never very
good at predicting which features people will like the most.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Gus is a Mac developer with a solid following and a couple of
very popular titles, the wiki editor VoodooPad and the image
editor
<A HREF="http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/">
   Acorn</A>.
I am a
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2005-06.html#e2005-06-16T15_51_13.htm">
   long-time user of VoodooPad</A>
and an occasional user of Acorn's progenitor,
<A HREF="http://flyingmeat.com/flysketch/">
   FlySketch</A>,
and so have experienced firsthand Gus's open relationship with
the users of his products.

If even he can't predict which features his users will like
most and least, there isn't a lot of hope for the rest of us.
Our best strategy is to follow the agile advice: release
often, get feedback soon and frequently, and learn from what
our the users of our software tell us.
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