10+ Days with Papers
Scimatic, Tech ·Crossposted from the Scimatic Blog.
We released the first Papers for Windows pre-release on February 14th, and I’ve got to say, it’s been an exciting couple of days! We’ve learned a number of things from the release:
Amp your Tweet-strat: Alex did a great job of building up some excitement for the surprise “love-in” for Windows on Valentine’s Day. There were a tonne of tweets (search on @papersapp), and the vast majority were positive. Here’s a few examples:
Don’t mess with Norton: Norton Anti-Virus now quarantines files based on “reputation,” and if your file doesn’t have a high-enough rep, it gets assigned “Ws.Reputation.1”, which looks like a virus signature. Windows users take that stuff pretty seriously. There’s a long discussion forum on Norton about this, and it’s similar to what IE9 does with the “Smart Screen.” The biggest factor was to digitally sign our installer with a cert.
Be prepared for users to do the thing that you warned them was unsupported: The biggest feature that we have to get right is the ability to share libraries between Macs and PCs. In this pre-release period, we said that this feature was, well, a pre-release feature and might have unexpected issues. Well, our users found a bunch that we didn’t even think of. So, thanks, and we’re working to fix them.
Release patches frequently: We’ve released two updates to the pre-release version based on feedback from users. I hope that they get the impression that we take all of their issues seriously and want to fix them as quickly as possible.
Have a good support site set up: The Mekentosj folks set up a great Tenderapp-driven site at pfw.mekentosj.com for support. It’s been working great.
It’s been a blast seeing the product “out in the wild” and interacting with users who are excited about the product.