Marjolein Katsma's dashboard

There are too few choices to begin with. License forms like careware, donationware and postcardware cannot be entered. And "demo" is a bad choice to include fully-functional trial versions - normally "demo" means the exact opposite: something you can "look at" but not actually use - worse even than crippleware which at least lets you do "something" while you haven't paid yet.

Such distinctions matter to people, especially Open Source and Shareware advocates. "Demo" is a piece of software that does not work (not a license type). Shareware is a distribution form. Open Source is a type of license that gives the user the right to the source code and the right to change it. Commercial means that something costs money - but that something can very well be shareware or be or contain Open Source. Bundled is again a distribution format (how you can acquire it) but doesn't say anything about license at all.

The list is a mishmash of different things, and the explanation doesn't really help to make a choice.

But the biggest problem is that you have to choose one option when often several are available, and/or several are applicable at the same time. The need is not to sum up all different limitations or pricing schemes, but to be able to indicate that there is a choice between free and a paid-for license. Or that a commercial license is Open Source (think of MySQL for instance which is Open Source and has commercial licenses). And so on.

Distribution (how you can get your hands on it), license (what you are allowed to do with it) and pricing (what it may cost and how you can pay) are three different and independent things.

The current "License type" item mixes them all up. This is a problem. A big one. The choices one is forced to make often lead to a false result, with no way to indicate the real situation.

The best solution would be to split this item into three separate items (or maybe two: is distribution form really important?), and allow multi-select on each of them as well (software and services may have different license types, and different pricing forms - including freeware - as well).

Here's another: "image management" - this could be either local (with a program like Picasa or IMatch) or remote (with a tool to organize galleries and upload photos for SmugMug).

There is now "Audio & Video - Management" but "images" is missing there. (Don't make this "photos": other graphics would fall under image management as well.)

I like this idea. For the UI it could be as simple as a radio button to set your default: () mark new apps public until I hide them; () mark new apps private until I release them -- and then for each app you'd need to be able to see their status (public or hidden) and a toggle to change that. How hard that would be to implement on the back end I have no idea, but I'd very much like to see it! – Marjolein Katsma, on November 02, 2008 15:31

oooh, your awesome 440 page is sweet - I had to go digging for that now: I collect "awesome 404 pages"! :D – Marjolein Katsma, on November 02, 2008 15:02

OK, I'll do that. I actually did it for CR Edit already because it had a missing icon. I could do the same for the Zazzle uploader by adding an icon for that and noting it's not the same as the Wesabe thingy (which does have an icon). – Marjolein Katsma, on November 02, 2008 06:22

Exactly! Plus it signals that someone actually has looked at it, as opposed to "nobody knows". – Marjolein Katsma, on November 02, 2008 06:14

Hmmm

When I click on those account links I get a "Sorry, there's been an error" page. If the accounts have been deleted or flagged somehow, that's not a very elegant way to handle it. ;)

Exactly what I was thinking! have an option to vote them up/down (and a limit below which they don't reappear). That way the community ultimate "decides" which tags are useful, and reviewing won't be necessary. – Marjolein Katsma, on November 02, 2008 05:54

Good idea! if you're on the road and using software for a long time without Wakoopa being able to inform the server, the results should be cached until the tracker can go online again.

Or is this happening already? Why has there been no reply to this?

I have this problem, too.

My current 6 recommendations show OpenOffice.org (which I already use, just not often), two IM apps (Trillian and Miranda - which I won't use since I already use Psi, and have actually abandoned Trillian long ago), and an email client which I hate (Thunderbird).. That's 4 useless (and even irritating) recommendations out of 6.

Give me a choice to say "I hate this app", or "evaluated and rejected already", or "doesn't run on my system". It's pretty useless to get recommendations for already-evaluated or abandoned software, or things you cannot use anyway - but those are fundamentally different reasons. It should be possible to say why a recommendation is no good: just a "remove this recommendation" button (as now) is not actually helpful.

For now, I'm totally ignoring the recommendations. The way it is now, it simply doesn't work for me.

Sounds like the password is not properly URL-encoded before sending to the server. A lot of characters have a 'special meaning" in a URL - if such a character occurs in a password it must be encoded to avoid misinterpretation.

Strong passwords (with upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and other "special" characters are good - but their usage requires that apps "know" how to handle them. Don't change your password - change the app. ;)

Hmmm, now there's an idea!

I've just posted in another thread stating it should be possible to keep private (alpha, beta) versions of programs hidden, especially if you are under NDA. But if Wakoopa doesn't "see" programs that are started via the command line, that could be a way to "hide" them.

Would this always work?

And another: "Credit" developed by ProVision (credit.exe) - whatever that is - is not the same thing as CR Edit by Plamen Parvanov (credit.exe), a lightweight programmer's text editor.

I just uploaded icon and more data about the latter.

Maybe we should have a thread for such (apparent) duplicates as well, just as there is now a tread for category suggestions?

There's another possible problem in automatic reporting, and that's when you are using a private alpha or beta version of an application while still under NDA: in other words you are not allowed to even talk about it. There should be a way to filter these out before Wakoopa picks them up, only filtering them afterwards would be a breach of your agreement!

It's not a matter of privacy but of contractual obligations.