The Business of Software

Hey guys, after more than an year in development, I finally finished my killer app FusionDesk.

So, it is my turn to ask for feedback.
The web site is http://www.fusiondesk.com

The copy on the site is not yet polished enough, I know, but any other comments and ideas on the site and the software will be greatly appreciated.

Few curious moments with it:

* Softpedia published FusionDesk before it was released: I did add the product to my Plimus store, and left it public. Softpedia are crawling Plimus obviously and quickly added FusionDesk on the site.

* FusionDesk was cracked before it was released: some crackers found the app in Softpedia, found a semi-official beta version on the site, and without hesitation released a crack for the beta :)

* FusionDesk sold few copies before it was released: few people involved with the beta testing found it useful enough even before it was finished and bought it.

So that's it. Interesting times lie ahead. Waiting to hear what you have to say.

Pozdravi Boris! Трябва да пием по едно да отпразнуваме launch-а, особено с ранния крак :)

Ще го огледам при първа възможност, изглежда много интересно.

Site and the screenshots look just great; I must say I am a bit jealous. The designer has earned his money to the last penny (I can’t believe you designed it your self, didn’t you?).
And what library are you using for the GUI, if it is not a secret?

Yes, I am not of much help, that’s because I am really impressed

Good luck
Goran

Damn, this software is AWESOME!!

Wow, wow.

I'm going to try it for the rest of today, you may have a sale here.

Your website looks great too.

Hey Boris, your product and website look really great. The design looks very professional both for the website and the software. I look forward to hearing how you progress as time goes on. Good luck!

Simply Beautiful !!!

Just fix the spelling on the OVERVIEW> Reliable paragraph (should be lose, not loose).

And where is that Palm interface ?

All kidding aside, it looks awesome !

Best of luck !

Your software looks great! Is it done in .NET? Which control suite did you use? I'm assuming you didn't do all the custom controls yourself.

Also, how did you find a designer for your website, icons and stuff like that?

Site looks great! I just installed the trial version. One thing that I have grown to like is when an installer asks me what startup group to put the shortcut into. We all know how crowded and unorganized the programs portion of the start menu can become, and since I have my own folders (office, programming, graphics, etc...), I like to have the installer just go ahead and put it where I like.

> Your software looks great! Is it done in .NET?

I heard Boris use Delphi. (Win32)

Anyway I also downloaded your start edition. It looks great.
Good luck and go ahead! : )

Downloaded to try.

A couple of comments:

1. Screenshots confused me since I expected a [X] Close the window button in the top right corner, while it in fact was in botton lower corner. To make things more confusing, the red cross button is at the right top corner, but it belongs to the image itself, not to the screenshot window.

2. Usually I expect a newly installed programs to run immediately after the setup has finished. It's not the case with FusionDesk, so I wondered if setup went ok.

3. After clicking Download Free Trial I expected to find a comment what trial means in this case (time-limited, functionality-limited, ...). None found.

4. FTP sync is cool (not tested yet). A more cooler would be only a GTalk sync ;)

... Ctrl-S seems as a bad shortcut for "Start timer" to me. Most apps use it for saving the work...

Perhaps he used this?

http://www.devcomponents.com/dotnetbar/

Site and App look great. I downloaded the trial. Here's my feedback:

1. It wasn't clear what I was downloading - the free version or a trial of the pro version. After 30 days do the pro features get disabled?

2. It triggered my firewall software. Typically this means I will immediately uninstall software unless I understand what the program is trying to do and why it's trying to connect out.

3. There was no uninstaller except through the control panel.

Other than that, the program looked great and had a very comprehensive feature set. I wish you the best with it.

I'm a spelling, punctuation & grammar butthead, so:

On the main page, one of the points under "Quick Feature Overview:"

Mange: Any of several skin and ear conditions caused by a variety of mites.

Or did you mean "Manage?"

Under the "Organize" sub-headings: "Organize task into folders" should be "Organize task_s_ into folders"

Watch use of upper case.  "Full Undo and Redo" should really be "Full undo and redo," and "Filter by Tags & Context" should be "Filter by tags & context."  Only names, cities, and other proper nouns should be capitalized.

"Time Tracking" is fine because that's the title of a feature.  "Filter by Tags & Context" is not ok because you are describing common things, "tags" and "context."

On the Products page:

"The Pro version, includes ... many more:" should be, "The Pro version includes ... much more:"  Use commas sparingly.  Many is quantitative.  Much is a generic label for "lots of."

On the Community page:

"What unites us ...to get more ... work in stress-free ..." should  be "... to be more ... work in a stress..."

Under Articles:

"Improve you productivity ..." should be "Improve your productivity ..."  and "'Getting Things Done'." should be "'Getting Things Done.'"  Punctuation almost always goes INSIDE a closing quote, not outside.

Under Purchase:

"All Purchases include:"  I would say this as "All products include:"

"90 days money back ..." should be "90 day money back ..."

"Immediate delivery after purchasing" should be "Immediate delivery after purchase"

In the Risk Free! box: "We offer unconditional ..." should be "We offer an unconditional ..."

Everywhere:

The "Newsletter" box: "... to do GTD better, become ..." should be "... to do GTD better and become ..."  Generally you don't put a comma before the last item in a comma'd list, and you use the word "and."

Under Go Mobile:

You use proper case (incorrectly) when referring to "Smart Phones" in the top paragraph, but not in the bottom paragraph.  Make sure your terms are consistent.  Since "smart phone" is a term, not a proper name for a product you should not capitalize it.

One thing you did right that I appreciate: you are using full justification and you only used one space between a period and the beginning of the next sentence.

Everything I've said above is picky, I know.  However, as in quality software it in taking care of the small details that make your web site makes your company and your product shine.

As others have also said, I love the look of the site.  It's clean, it's attractive and very easy to navigate.  Great job!  I'll download and play with the product this weekend.

If I'm going to pick about you:

"... it is taking care of the small details that makes your web site, your company and your product shine."

It's late at night here & I've been going since 4am.  That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

"I heard Boris use Delphi. (Win32)"

Ah, that would explain the small download size and no mentioned of .NET dependencies. :) I have the Telerik, Syncfusion, Infragistics, ComponentOne, DevExpress control suites for .NET plus a couple of others, but they're all huge. Since I come from the world of C++ with small, self-contained executables, I feel guilty every time I place one of these controls on a form.

Looked good so I downloaded and installed it. However it crashed on startup and then appeared to send an e-mail crash report without permission. I am a bit concerned about that...

Hi Boris, 

Congrats the site looks great and the app is very nice. The UI looks a bit cluttered to me and it is not implementing MS's spec in place, for example:

http://www.fusiondesk.com/screenshots/time-tracking.png

There the text overflows on certain buttons (Purge History, for example). The group should have collapsed to smaller icons at this size. In many places the icons would benefit from more "air" around each image.

But it does look like you have a winner there. I mean being cracked before you release means that someone wants it badly!

There is an image missing at (click the estimate image):
http://www.fusiondesk.com/products/time-tracking.html

the link to the missing image is:
http://www.fusiondesk.com/screenshots/estimate.png

it is delphi,and probably skinned with http://www.link-rank.com/ which is very easy to do.

>FusionDesk sold few copies before it was released

Thats a good sign!

On the front page the justification of the text under "organize" makes it look odd on FireFox.

The UI looks very slick, but perhaps a little 'busy'.

Good luck with it.

Thanks for the great feedback guys.

The app was done in Delphi, and is using Toolbar 2000 + TBX + SpTBX components. Additionally I wrote few controls myself and some code to make it paint as I wanted it to.

I believe Delphi was the best choice, but in several years I am sure .net will be the more appropriate one. In future there will probably be a Windows Mobile (Pocket PC & Smart Phones) version (now it can sync with the Pocket PC). There will probably be some gadget or widget or whatever that will interact with FusionDesk. And there can be an online version (or at least online viewer / dashboard / workspace). All of these will probably be based on C#.

Vladimir, thanks for the ideas/comments. I ran all my apps in the past when the installer completed. I saw it is not the default behavior of MS apps, and not what they are advocating. I wonder what others think of that?

Ctrl+S could really be mistaken for save shortcut I will consider changing it. FusionDesk auto-saves its data so there is no need for the shortcut.

Nick, Microsoft strongly advices that you put only shortcuts to executables in the start menu and don't add uninstallers. Big players like Adobe comply to that too. It is good idea not to add it for Vista too, since one of the best way to start apps is with searching - tyke 'Fus' and FusionDesk is the only option left, or there will be an Uninstall FusionDesk if you added it which would not be very convenient. FusionDesk auto checks for updates. That is the thing that probably alerted your firewall. If I leave it like that it might be a concern to some people, if I do not, most people will not know of updates. That's something to think about.

Karl, thanks a lot for the corrections. The copy is still not final, but your suggestions are very helpful. I think I need to pay a copywriter to make it better though. Someone have good suggestions about that?

Jose, thanks for the notice. I fixed the site. I will improve the Ribbon to be collapsable rather soon.

Dan, I use EurekaLog for bug reporting. On the error dialog it has a check box that is checked by default that says 'Send error by email'. You can definitely uncheck it. I was wondering about this very same issue, but if I leave it unchecked by default few people will actually send bugs.

Thanks again guys. It wasn't the greatest timing, releasing FusionDesk in the last week of the year, but I am looking forward for the big sales in January. Hopefully it will be a great month for all of us.

Congrats Boris. Looks great. I hate the font you use on your website though. It's almost unreadable.

"I believe Delphi was the best choice, but in several years I am sure .net will be the more appropriate one."

Delphi is a development environment.

.Net is a technology.

They are not competitors - Codegear makes a .Net version of Delphi.

In a few years it may make sense to release a .Net version of your product, and you will be able to do it in Delphi if you want - as long as people let Codegear compete.  They don't need competition from their own user community.

Delphi = language + IDE + VCL.
.net is more of a platform than Delphi, still the comparison is valid.

Delphi .net is not entirely compatible with VCL, thus I can't just convert my application to .net with a recompile (BTW CodeGear = development part of Borland).

Boris I'll and to the list of congratulations. Site looks great and I like copy a lot. Did you write it?

I'd be tempted to add a screen shot on the home page and more info on the product itself. This would also help with SEO. I can't see a need for the "News" and "Community" columns, and would put the product info there.

You should try and use the "Quick Feature Overview" area to link off to pages with those topics.

"Learn More" is to me the most important link you have yet it is only listed once and only on the home page. I would add this to the top menu bar.

On the "Products | Starter Edition | Read More" I'd add the extra Tabs you see in the Pro Edition page and have text saying "These capabilities available in the Pro Version - Buy Now". This points out what they are missing and gives you an "upsell" opportunity.

One complaint is I don't like the Menu at the bottom of the page. I'm using my Notebook and have to scroll way down to get to it. Folks who only ever look "above the fold" won't ever see these all important links.

What code did you use for the screen shot overlay? I'd like to see "Close" at top right as well as on the bottom.
You need to check the text descriptions on all the screen shots as some are incorrect. I'd expand these from a label to descriptive sentence.

"Forums" starts a new Browser instance!

It is refreshing to see something so polished. Best of luck in your venture. I hope you have great success.

One more thingy: when I have a folder selected, and do right-click, and then "New Folder" I expect that the folder would become a subfolder of the currently selected one.

Well, I played with the app and finally still removed it. It's well done, and must have a market share out there, but I'm just looking for something specific: a mix between requirements gathering tool and PM tool. My test is simple: I try to write and organize requirements in a PM tool the same way I do in a word processor (so that requirements constitute a document or look like that) but at the same time every requirement might have associated tasks and links to other requirements (and history, and versions...). Unfortunately, I did not feel FusionDesk follows this approach, so I'm not going to use it. But it's only my personal bias. There are as many ways to work with projects as people out there.

Oh! one more! I couldn't really figure out how to setup a FTP connection to sync things. :( May be you need some sort of wizard there.

I hate to take this post completely off track, but ...

"Delphi = language + IDE + VCL."

Er, no.

Delphi is an integrated software development environment (ISDE) comprising an IDE, a compiler, a linker, and other tools.  You can buy Delphi in several versions.  One version of the Turbo Delphi IDE is "Turbo Delphi for .Net," which is a version of the Delphi ISDE that produces .Net-compatible/compliant executables.

Borland Developer Studio for .Net is a direct competitor to Microsoft Visual Studio .Net.

".net is more of a platform than Delphi."

It's a platform, period.  Just like Win32 is a platform, and MS-DOS is a platform, and like many other runtime environments are platforms.

I think that when you say ".net" you really mean to say "Microsoft Visual Studio .Net."

"... still the comparison is valid."

No, it's not.  You can only compare an apple to an orange to the extent that they are both fruit foods.  You can only compare an apple to a mushroom to the extent that they are both human-edible foods.  You can't compare an apple to an oxygen molecule except that they are both comprised of atoms.  Your comparison of Delphi (an ISDE) to .Net (a common runtime platform for applications) is not valid, even though it's a common mistake for people to make.

Many people say "I'm going to upgrade my app to .Net" when they really mean, "I'm going to upgrade my VB6 app to VB6.Net." or "I'm going to upgrade my Clipper app to C#.Net."  They are using sloppy terminology to say "Microsoft Visual Studio .Net" but Microsoft has so lulled us into equating their .Net technology with Visual Studio .Net that people just accept it.

What I was originally trying to tell you was that if and when you are ready to create a .Net version of your application, you will be able to use Delphi For .Net to do it - and I realize there will be significant differences involved from migrating from the VCL to .Net.

"I believe Delphi was the best choice, but in several years I am sure .net will be the more appropriate one."

The appropriate way to say this would have been, "I believe Win32 was the best choice, but in several years I am sure that .Net will be more appropriate" (comparing two platforms) or "I believe Delphi was the best choice, but in several years I am sure that C# will be more appropriate because Codegear won't be any more successful than Borland in convincing the corporate drones of this world that theirs is a better way to go than Microsoft bloatware" (comparing two competing languages).

I am not going to nitpick spelling or grammar. 

The things that I saw that I don't care for are:

1. Under Community tab, the link to the forum does not have any posts.  Can't you put a Welcome post or something?
2. The Blog page does not use the same tabbed format as the rest of the site, so I clicked Back to get back to the main site.
3. The Articles link gives me a 404 Not Found error.  Either put an article up or remove the link until you do post an article.  Maybe eliminate the Articles altogether and just use your blog for that purpose.
4. Full Ribbon discussion just has a screenshot of the toolbars.

I don't know that much about GTD.  How many other potential users of your software are like me?  Maybe you can try to go into some of the details of GTD and how the software assists in applying those concepts.

Also, there is a problem with the navigation.

Here are the steps that I took:
Clicked Products tab.  Clicked Read More for the Starter Edition.  Okay, the page is the Starter Edition.  I read the Overview.  Then I click Organize to read more, and I am now on the Pro Edition.  Even if I click Overview again, I am on the Pro Edition.  Is this intentional to try and push people to the Pro Edition, or just bad navigation links?

The screen shots look very nice.  Just curious: did you agree to the license allowing you to use the Ribbon?

A lot of folks say there is no merit to it.  Even if true, I don't think I'd want to be the one to test it.

Boris,

Here's the license I'm referring to, just in case there's any confusion:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb218966.aspx

It doesn't seem to be overly burdensome (for the common case, at least).  I'm still curious as to whether you agreed to it.

Here's the more general Office UI licensing page:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.aspx

Boris

The program looks very nice (I assume the functionality is suberb too). However, when I first saw the little green circle with the white cross in it next to the project tabs, my initial reaction was to click it to close the tab. I didn't realize it was an addition sign, not an "X" at first. I realize that the color green could also be a clue to indicate something "going" rather than "leaving" (red). Perhaps twisting the white cross so it sits more vertical would help.

I know this is a minor nit pick but I think all critism is good.

Congratulations, Boris! I think your new application has a great future.

I have sent a list of my suggestions. Most of the them are minor ones, but they'll make FusionDesk even better :)

Btw, when do you intend to have the video tutorials ready?

Hi Boris

I am so very impressed with your software. Although I do like constructive criticism, some of these comments are just rude.

You did a phenomenal job on the UI - everything in one screen - it is wonderful. I appreciate the GTD, Covey templates [at least the start of them] and can't wait to download updates to your product.

I guess my comments would be:

-- would be great to have an online version that I can 'travel' with [i notice that is on your list]

-- would love to see a gantt chart in the Reports section

-- would be nice to use to add sequence to tasks and dependencies between tasks



thank you - will be purchasing it soon - still evaluating it!