Ultra Recall reviews

[schferk]

There's a recent UR review in pcworld, from a certain Ian Harac.

The review is from september, and it's fifth find in google for just "ultra recall" (= not "ultra recall review"), so you cannot be more prominent than that, and thus it should not be ignored by kinook, but it is.

The bottom line of the review is very positive, but it's written from a very unqualified pov, i.e. Mr. Harac doesn't seem to understand much about outlining and / or IM (and how could he, he does "reviews" on pcworld in numbers, for any sw there might be there, and if he's only paid 50 bucks or so apiece, it's quite understandable that he won't begin each "review" with 3 days of reading the available web material about each sw category before beginning to trial, and to write about his trial), and it clearly shows, even to prospects, so the question remains if such a "positive" review that is incompetent even at first sight (and erroneous in part), is really helpful to bring new customers, left alone (= as it is). Also, he might have a char / word limit within which to write much better stuff than he delivered re UR would take (too much) time (if it's paid 50 bucks or so) even for an expert on the matter.

So, an advisable approach to such pieces of "unwanted recommandation" would be to create an "account" there, then say something on the lines of "Thank you very much for your kind review and your bottom line that I dare seeing as a recommandation, and allow for my giving some more details about our sw (and even a minor correction): blah and yada."

On the other hand, such a thing could be / could have been written by a member of the respective community defending his beloved sw, but 3 months later and for a 5th find for the sw in question, that's not been done either. (Whilst for a weird thing like CT, their's plenty of crap like "Why you should buy CT when in fact you were searching for an outliner!" throughout the web - people who fall for such manipulative crap will be "very pleased" afterwards, as soon as they get that's it's not their lack of understanding / intelligence (which they will have initially blamed) that they can NOT do with CT at the end of the day, what they had initially planned to do, but that they were simply ripped off by (manipulative - no, that'd be an oxymoron) propaganda.

So, the (official, by the owner, and UR's followers') UR approach to public statements is the direct opposite of the CT approach (at least as far the lapdop speak-out is concerned, the developer doesn't have any propaganda left to do - you see I don't fall into the trap of saying "too much", even "between the lines").

So why is it this way here?

- Not enough care of the developer for his own product's standing in the public eye.

- Not enough caring (any more) of disenchanted customers for a product they don't see in active development (anymore / currently), and where they see the developer doesn't speak out, even vÃ*v them, "internally" if I may say, to encourage his customers that yes, indeed, he will broaden the feature set of his product, and the utility for a wider public, by this enlarging the return of his product which will in turn give him the means to do even more work on his product, and so on - no upside spiralling here, and not even promises to do real work within a minor scope, i.e. without trying to multiply the customer base - nada.

Hence the remembrance, for more than one current customer, those (honest but desastrous) declarations of the developer back in 2008 or 2009, re "maintenance yes, developing no". And with these in mind, more than one current customer will say to himself, in the absence of positive declarations, might it be possible that kinook learned from that tolling experience? Which would mean, in plain English, no positive announcement, so there's a chance for the "maintenance yes, active development no" policy announced back then, having come into effect?

Hence no UR fanboys (anymore) to positively comment / give further positive info even on 5th find google results when normally you'd have assumed that not one but several UR customers would be happy to jump in on such an occasion to praise the product they perhaps use 40 hours or more every week.

I'm far from rejoicing at this state of affaires, since I consider UR at the top of comparable products - but that also means there's much left out, not a single one of all these competitors being ready for prime time: They are ALL sub-standard if you allow, and within such a competition, UR is "best" or, at the very least, among the very best.

But no reason for anybody to rave about it - incl. the developer who refrains from such an occasion (5th google place, i.e. everybody interested in UR would read it) served to him onto a silver plate though.

Do better than this, as well for the communication, as for the product behind.

Will you ?

EDIT : Off-topic: 6th on google for "ultra recall" is the 61 p.c. off with bits, which is another marketing disaster, since prospects will have a look there, deduct UR isn't "worth" the asking price of 100 bucks, but only 40, but since they can't get it for this price, and so are strongly demotivated to buy it at 100, preferring some competing product where is no such promo they will have missed - at best, they wait for the next UR promo, which means a prospect that would normally have brought 100 bucks will now bring in 19.50 bucks. Hence the spiraling downward, instead of any rise in interest. (As for the CT touting, well, CT is the "product" of an outlinersw group dynamics meaning people try to convince themselves that they are sort of an "elite" - I would have presumed that role (once played by UR, no?!) becoming cast one day by IQ, but then, not. Well, group dynamics have their own rules, and quality considerations ain't one of them as we all know.)

EDIT 2 : I just read in the "review" of Treepad Plus, by the same guy for the same site, "Over the past decade, I've used two text information programs daily for personal projects: ConnectedText ($40) and TreePad Plus. " - OMG: This only serves to show that 10 years of using CT make you to lose almost all your possible IM landmarks. (And btw, his argument there about an unpleasant legacy GUI in order to retain the existing customer base is rubbish by any possible pov: Fact is, many developers buy the cheapest basic components (or even free ones), as ugly as they might be, and then they could perfectly replace them with a much better-looking framework later on, retaining the same overall layout, and with rather little adoption efforts required. But no, they refrain from this negligeable effort, and they refrain from the cost they would encur, hence the ugliness of their products. UR is at the opposite here: They use a graphically very pleasant framework, so UR isn't ugly at all but rather beautiful for a normal Windows applic - it's just that the tree hasn't got formatting, and the editor neither got mouse wheel control nor basic-functional spreadsheets.

Off-topic : Treepad is a classic example of the double-edgedness of making a totally crippled free version, too: Most "reviews" about TV are about that piece of crap (and must necessarily be putting off), so rather few people only bother to have a better look at their paid editions - which are too many, anyway.