There comes a time in every software program where upgrades to add new features are a takeaway. I mean it’s like when you are too fat and you need to say no to yet … another … Twinkie.

Now there are marketing urges and developer urges. I’m talking strictly developer urges in this post. I’m not saying that from a marketing standpoint releasing some dolled up new version of your software doesn’t continue to promote your brand because obviously it does. The point is: are you adding features the software really needs or would it be better to make another, different program that incorporates and assists the original program? Or how about adding a plugin structure and regularly offering new plugins? This way those users who really want to tinker with your software every five minutes can do so. Those users who want to run the program so slow that the clock ceases to function correctly can go crazy.

And no, no, no I don’t mean upgrading for the sake of patching security holes or staying current with a new OS. That isn’t an upgrade, that’s essential, responsible patching. If you talk to users who get comfortable using a program with a certain interface, they don’t like it when developers change what they are comfortable using and yet some can’t resist. The guilty parties are scrambling, they know who they are.

There are plenty of examples out there of software which has gone too far with adding new features. AOL comes first to mind. I don’t remember any new version of AOL being that much better than AOL 3.0. In fact one of my first posts at this blog was about AOL’s upgradeitis although I didn’t call it that back then. I’ve written about upgradeitis over the years but it’s like that bad penny that keeps returning.

I think Wordpress, another example, succumbed to upgradeitis roughly two years ago. Sure, the new x.xxx design looks better but enough already on tweaking and tweaking and retweaking the interface. You have a mature plugin structure, why bother? Give it up folks, it’s a freaking blog client, not an old car worth restoring. And all these new tweaks seek to introduce old security problems. A friend’s comparison this morning: “WP is becoming like MS security patches.” So true.

And then there is Word. Good old Word. I think this word processor ceased needing new features somewhere around 1995 and challenge readers to point to an absolute must have feature that Word 95 didn’t have that Word 2007 has. Another friend of mine who has been a professional printer for 20 years was so disgusted with the new ribbon interface in Word that when he got a new computer he downgraded back to Word 2003.

That’s probably a good sign that your software has reached upgradeitis status, BTW: when the downgrading begins. Now let’s make a list since everybody loves lists.

10 signs you should stop upgrading your software  … WHEN …

1. … you think it’s time to change an established interface design
2. … users start downgrading
3. … you think users are bored of your software
4. … you are bored of your software
5. … sales are down
6. … the competition upgrades
7. … you want to add a feature that has little to do with the core function of the program (hint: optional plugin)
8. … the year changes
9. … it’s been too long since the last upgrade (hint: optional plugin)
10. … there is a full moon out

Exceptions abound

There are always exceptions like Turbotax which is a good example of software that needs to continue to be updated. Why? The tax laws are constantly changing. This changes the core function of their program and they must upgrade. But if the tax laws don’t change and they simply want to add new features to an already feature-laden program? Stop already.

Have to give credit to a few good developers out there like Dave Winer who seem to understand there is a lifecycle to software. That it’s neither prudent nor wise to kick a good thing in the eye or keep poking the dead hunting for one more smile.

Thanks Abraham for sharing how the HR department view differs from a programmer’s.

Got a good morning chuckle out of this one, particularly the negative programmer points for “topless in Facebook picture” and “Lists Visual Basic experience first.” What is that about perception being everything?

Have been working on a script to track our cold call marketing efforts and decided it would be kind of fun and useful to have the script echo back messages to motivate me when certain conditions are met.

The example above shows what we see when we have made no cold calls yet for the day. Cold calling is an art unto itself. It’s a matter of steeling yourself for rejection after rejection after refection to reach a small few people who might be interested. Salespeople tend to look at it as a numbers game. You call X number of people and you’ll find X number of people who might be interested in the products/services you are selling.

Custom self-motivational messages

What other self-motivational messages do you think would be good to add to this script? The "Hey, hit the phones already!" is bound to get old. I’m thinking of dumping the messages in a basic array like this:

$motivational_msg = array(’msg1′,’msg2′,’msg3′);

Then choosing a message at random and displaying. Very similar to a simple quote rotating script. Just off the top of my head here’s some other possible motivational phrases I’m considering:

• No activity happens without action
• You’ve got a few minutes, pick up the phone already

What other self-motivational messages can you think of?

Full compliance with FTC Do Not Call List

We are fully compliant with the FTC Do Not Call list and do not call any number that is in this database, BTW. Each number is checked before adding to our calling database and rechecked before calling. We refresh the DNC list regularly for new added/dropped number. Once your number is on this list and 31 days have passed, you should stop receiving most telemarketing calls. As of Feburary 2008, being listed is permanent until you request removal:

Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008. Read more about it at http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/04/dncfyi.shtm.

If you want to delete your number from the Do Not Call Registry, all you have to do is call from the number to have deleted: 1-888-382-1222 (TTY 1-866-290-4236)

Note to other telemarketers: you can sign up for Do Not Call registry list downloads at https://telemarketing.donotcall.gov/ 

You can receive up to five area codes for free. In the state of Washington there are only five area codes, so that covers us for the entire state. Any area code needed beyond five costs $54/year. This can become expensive for telemarketers what work in locations where there are a lot of area codes like Florida where there are like 22.

There are Wordpress plugins out there that will display who has left the most comments at your WordPress powered blog, but what if you want to query this directly from the MySQL database? Here are the queries required to do that.

Show top 10 commenters at your blog with URL and email address

Note that Lestat and ^Lestat are the same person. This query comes in handy to see users that have changed their names to leave different comments. Sterling has done this too, adding "chip" between his name in 16 comments, giving him a grand total of 619 comments.

As of this morning’s query this blog has 13,162 approved comments. You can find this number inside the WordPress admin dashboard area, but if you want to query it, use the following:

For reference:

1 = comment approved
0 = comment pending
spam = comment marked as spam

A past Hmm post shows the query necessary to delete spam comments from a WordPress database.

How many comments have I made as of this writing? 1,976 (15%). I’d be curious from a percentage basis seeing how that compares to other bloggers. Feel free to provide your own percentage stats in the comments or trackback.

I’m going to make an extra effort to get these top commenters on future Hmmcast Live shows. Since they aren’t textually shy, maybe the same will apply to audio versions.

Show top 10 commenters for year at your blog

What if you wanted to find out who the top commenters were by year? Here’s the query to do that:

Just replace 2008 with the year you want to check.  I ran this for years 2003-2007 as well as 2008 to date. If you’d like to see how many comments were made by year, use the following query:

It’s interesting to note the numbers of comments received by year as this blog has grown.

2003 - total comments made: 93

2004 - total comments made: 561 (+503%)

2005 - total comments made: 2405 (+329%)

2006 - total comments made: 4,940 (+105%)

2007 - total comments made: 3,642 (-26%)

2008 - total comments made through November 14, 2008: 1,517

Notes:

• the peak for most comments received in the year to this blog was in 2006 and has fallen off noticeably since. I’m sure there are many bloggers who would love to have over 100 comments left a month so believe me I’m not complaining. But for the curious, why has this happened? Are blogs dying as some are suggesting? Or is commenting on blogs themselves dying? I don’t think so. Sure, traffic is down a bit here for the year, but not to the degree of the number of comments dropping off.
• There are tons of places these days to comment externally like Twitter, FriendFeed. I predict this trend of leaving comments elsewhere will level off somewhat and we’ll see return to commenting at blogs directly. Perhaps this won’t rebound in 2009, but I don’t see things deteriorating much further.
• There remain good reasons to leave comments at blogs, particularly for bloggers wanting other bloggers to follow blog comments to signature URLs. I’m sure there are a good number of readers who don’t use these microblogging tools, nor care to.
• In the post dated July 23, 2007 I noted that commenting activity had "increased dramatically" over the last year — statistically, at least from a calendar year basis this appears inaccurate. I’m not sure from reading that post what queries I was using to come to that conclusion, but the numbers above don’t lie.

How is commenting activity going at your blog?

Questions for bloggers: have you seen a similar drop-off? What kinds of things are you doing to invite more comments left on your blog?

Questions for non-bloggers: why aren’t you leaving as many comments on blogs as in year’s past? Or are you leaving more? More directly, what would make you more likely to leave more comments on this blog?

Apple is flexing their quality control muscle by rejecting applications based on "limited utility." This, no doubt, a knee jerk response to pulling the expensive iPhone application I Am Rich and spawns a rejection of another app called Pull My Finger. I’m sure there are plenty more what many might call stupid, pointless, worthless applications that Apple is subjectively deciding not to publish and promote.

Techdirt’s Kevin Donavon makes an odd and not quite fitting comparison to Wikipedia, Twitter and CouchSurfing:

While I agree that the application in question has little use, this is a dangerous precedent that could easily have been used to ban Wikipedia, Twitter or CouchSurfing.

I wouldn’t go that far. Look, the web has always been a fairly level playing field for whatever crazy idea someone can come up with and promote. If some dude with an application that does nothing more than be too expensive and it gets popular, hey, more power to them. Same thing with a sophomoric humor application like Pull My Finger.

Wikipedia solved an itch: the ability for regular people to be able to contribute to an encyclopedia collectively. To a much lesser and more niche following, the same applies to Twitter where the cliche ’short and sweet’ and the popularity of text messaging converge. Can’t speak for CouchSurfing because I don’t know much about them but again if they can find success with something you and I might think is silly but others enjoy then more power to them.

Apple has the business right to exercise whatever quality control they want around their App store. If their requirements are too restrictive or too vague this opens the playing field for somebody else to come along and compete. I realize it’s their playing field, but you could always make apps that run on competing phones, yes? Don’t get mad, go out and promote your app on an iPhone competitor that doesn’t reject applications that they deem as having limited utility.

What do you think? Is using "limited utility" a good idea for quality control? Or should Apple let iPhone have the quality control gauge? I believe the web is already a working example of quality control so that you don’t need to impose additional quality control standards on an application breeding ground if you, well, want it to breed.

Perhaps unrelated and of little concern to those who aren’t AAPL shareholders (disclaimer: I am a current AAPL shareholder) but as one I’d like to see Apple not use subjective rules like this for quality control for iPhone applications. They should ferret out anything that’s a security risk or spammy and if they don’t want porn, fine, that too, but beyond that, let the users be your QA team.

Mr. Donavon is right in one respect: having undefined quality control standards on one project will open a company to these questions about other services that accept submissions from third parties. For that reason alone I think if you are planning on releasing something where other developers submit programs to you, it would be wise not to impose subjective quality control rules.

I’m sure there is a Windows application out there that sorts desktop files into folders automatically already and if there isn’t then somebody should develop one post haste. I complained about desktop clutter almost three years ago, ouch. It’s been on my development to-do list for some time and this morning after staring at my desktop I decided to ask the rest of the world if such an animal already exists. Here’s a picture showing the problem:

What I’ve been doing for far too long is manually sorting these desktop files by type into folders. Like image files are sorted into a ’screenshots’ folder and .txt files are sorted into a ‘writing’ folder. It wouldn’t be that involved having a program that watches the desktop folder and then auto sorts any file by type (or custom definition rule) into custom directories defined by the user. It could also be run as a scheduled task once a day to clean out the icons of the day and sort into date stamped archive folders also customizable by the end user. Like say I wanted to have the program auto sort each day’s desktop files into monthly folders like July2008, Aug2008, etc., but the default should be to just sort into one folder so one doesn’t have to make too many clicks to get to the file.

If you’re reading this and have the perfect Windows application in mind — freeware, donationware, shareware or commercial — please pipe up in the comments section below with a link. If it’s a commercial or shareware application feel free to use your own affiliate code and if it looks good to me and you’re the first to mention I’ll buy the program through your link. Or write a blog post and trackback in, your choice. If I only hear crickets on this one I may just have to break out Visual Studio and get this done. I need a useful little app like this.

If it does cost money for this application, it shouldn’t cost very much. This isn’t Photoshop. I’m thinking $20 or less. Thank you in advance for the help.

Update 10:16am PST: Wow, that didn’t take long. Major props to Dean in the comments below for pointing me to Belvedere by Lifehacker’s Adam Pash. Now look at my desktop (right). As the screenshot displays in the upper left corner I’ve got the recycle bin (emptied) and four shortcuts to the following directories:

icons - this contains shortcuts to all programs with the word ’shortcut’. Windows, by default adds the word shortcut to each shortcut on the desktop.
screenshots - all files matching .jpg, .gif, .png and .bmp are automatically moved off the desktop by Belvedere to this directory.
software - zip files are moved here
writings - .txt, pdf and html files moved here

My most commonly used programs are stored in Rocketdock which is right aligned and takes up a very tiny amount of screen real estate. I linked to my original post about Rocketdock in the comments area below. This is on the short list of useful programs I regularly use on Windows plus it gives it a little of that Mac flavor.

For Mac Readers, Belvedere is based on the Mac program Hazel ($21.95, just about the price I suggested a program like this should cost). I’m not sure what is out there for Linux, but a desktop auto clean-up program should be a standard accessory in every OS. If anybody knows of something similar that will help Linux users keep their desktops tidy, feel free to use the comments below to share.

Been a little while since I’ve mentioned Chumby.

It still sits to the left of my computer monitor, nestled atop the printer, updating me through a dozen different widgets throughout the day on things like stock prices, my horoscope, what happened on this day in history and so on. To date it’s been used like a $179 billboard, rather than anything that useful or revolutionary.

This morning the New York Times has a piece which discusses the monetization scheme for Chumby (emphasis mine):

Businesses are free to distribute widgets that use information from their own sites, except if they want those widgets to display advertising or sell something. In that case, the only thing that is open is Chumby’s phone line. It expects to be paid a cut of all the money made over its system.

At first I didn’t see as many Public Service Announcements on Chumby, but I’ve noticed an increase. I realize the Chumby can be modified to function as a lighthttpd server which better suits my needs and would use 100% of my bandwidth. I’m thinking about doing that because I don’t really want or need to see commercials in between widgets. That’s too similar to the TV model of content, commercials, content. Anybody else reading using their Chumby this way and want to share your experiences in the comments below?

My original plans were to do some amount of Chumby widget development but since I don’t have and have little desire to pay $679 to buy the Flash IDE, I’ve kept on the fence. There are some open source alternatives to doing Flash development, but they looked a little time intensive. Is there an open source Chumby Flash lite IDE that somebody reading knows about and is using? I’d still like to get into developing some Chumby widgets, but if this calls for me buying the Flash IDE, it will probably be back-burnered.

Also, anybody running Silverlight applications on Chumby yet? I see some PHP 5.25 binaries were cooked up already.

With 3D Online Package it’s easy to generate 3D box art. Just upload a graphic in PNG, GIF or JPG format for the cover, side and top and the server side program generates the graphic that you can copy and use.

Added to the online generators list.

The Crunchies? Please tell me they aren’t going to do this.

I’d say no offense before launching into this rant, but I’m still laughing as I type. It’s so crazy, I can’t stop laughing. The Crunchies? The Crunchies!

Om Malik could be the nicest guy in Sillicon Valley for all I know, haven’t met him but will take Mark Evans word. I have met Richard MacManus and Michael Arrington who both seemed like pleasant chaps in person, but the idea of these three along with Venturebeat teaming up and comparing the small start-up world awards to the GRAMMYs is laughable. The combined readership of TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, Gigaom and Venturebeat barely dents the number of albums James Blunt’s first CD sold.

Gotta love the comment from cweeb: “Come on Om, don’t bend over to techcrunch everyday.”

Malik contends that “the community will have a lot to say here.” Now this is something I have to see. Voting on the internet can so easily be gamed that I’m extremely cynical of any web system ever being fair and I’m a programmer.

The real reason sites offer awards
I understand the giving out awards at a site — or in this case from multiple sites. This has been happening for many years on the web and they usually mean one thing: more exposure for the site running the awards.

A lot of award sites require or strongly encourage entrants to link back to them and promote to their audience — vote for me, vote for me. It’s a guaranteed proven way to manipulate traffic to the website(s) behind the award. On the eve of Google penalizing sites for selling text links, contributing to link farms and link schemes, The Crunchies team needs to be very careful about how they promote their awards.

And let’s not forget that even a worthless program can get a five star award out there. The Crunchies team has a lot of swashbuckling to do in those chilly awards infested waters, arrr!

Will the Crunchies be the Crappies? We’ll have to wait and see when the details of the awards system are published, but they’ll at least be worth a laugh. Imagine what the award will look like? A bowl of Captain Crunch, maybe? Priceless! Thanks for the morning laugh guys.

When it comes to getting excited about new standards or versions of programming languages I tend to take a more reserved approach.

Quietly — yes, I can be quiet sometimes — evaluating the details myself and when applicable trying to put to some real world applications. A practical, pragmatic approach to consider using any new technology. I would rather spend those breaths of air exploring technology that is here and now instead of fighting standards wars. I’ll defer those battles respectfully to people closer to the metal on the issues. I’m a programmer, not a designer, and while yes web standards still matter to me, this isn’t my area of expertise. The other day I discovered that neither is brewmastery (thanks Sterling and Vince). Sometimes it’s better not to venture too far from the nest.

So recently when I heard that the ECMAScript 4th Edition aka Javascript ES4 is causing blood pressure to be raised in a few folks, I look for people more entrenched to see if there is fire where there is smoke. I’ve met Dori Smith, co-author of Javascript & AJAX, in person and she’s one source on Javascript that I trust.

In Dori’s post yesterday, she doesn’t appear too concerned:

Look, it’s always been the case with JavaScript, and it’s one of the things I like best about the language: it’s all about what works in the majority of browsers. If it doesn’t work in the majority of existing browsers, it’s utterly irrelevant. And given that this group has shown an inability to actually ship, it’s even less relevant.

If you think I’m dismissing ES4 too casually at this point, please feel free as always to correct me below.