venerdì 6 novembre 2009

1.2.0 is out...and how to get feedback from your users - quickly!

Ladies and gentlemen, the 1.2.0 is out...

the change-log itself looks scary :-D But of course we're not sleeping: the 1.2.1 beta1 is already available in the forum, featuring the long awaited Auto-categorization rules.


Something useful now: how to get feedback from a trial

We're fans of the excellent a smart bear blog, and we got inspiration from this article about getting feedback from the users.

How did we implement it? How long did it take?
What we needed was a way to have a user communicating with us what was wrong with Tabbles, this should have included a list of options with check-boxes as well as a few empty fields to write something into. Coding this into our desktop app would have been a nightmare (open a socket, and write into a remote db making sure that the user's firewall wouldn't get too angry about it... ) and it would have been even worst having the thing to run when the user was uninstalling... :-|

Well, our website is based on Joomla, so we thought: why not using joomla to do this? Joomla has a built-in poll, but it's pretty limited: only radio buttons, no free-writing field and max 12 questions (!).
After a 5 minutes tour in the joomla extensions directory I found the excellent PollXT which does exactly what I needed and within 10 mins our poll was online. This looks like the best component I've seen in a while... it does everything it's supposed to (and as you need more, it's there already), it's stable and very intuitive: A+ to the author! Uh, did I mention that it's donationware? :-D

All we did is calling a custom action on uninstalling, so the uninstaller calls a web page (which opens without ringing any alarm bell) and PollXT does all the rest.


P.S.: there is in an interview of me here :-D

1 commento:

  1. I've seen these sites three times and and I already wanted to answer:
    "No need to fear guys, I'm just updating" xD

    RispondiElimina

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