Many Pies

Many Pies

Wednesday, December 28, 2005

I downloaded a 30 day trial of Radio Userland the other day because a site they hosted some of my stuff on was no longer free.

I don't think I've had a worse experience with software that is mature and commercial. I expected the unintuitive interface (though having used its predecessor years ago, Frontier, and then used a Mac I could see how the outlining worked). I didn't expect it to keep on nagging me to register every time I ran it, even after I'd registered (several times because it didn't give feedback that it had worked). It was slow to do some things, and didn't change the cursor so I knew it was working on it. Other things (export to text) just didn't work at all without an error message. It crashed on me, but fortunately I'd got my data out of it in some sort of text form which I can use in future.

If I intended to purchase it I'd log these complaints through the support channels, but seeing as I'm not I thought I'd share my experiences here.

It is powerful, it was worked on by some high fliers (in some circles) like Dave Winer and Robert Scoble (he worked in the company, I'm not sure if he worked on the product and I'm too lazy to research), so it's probably worth a look at if you can get over these annoyances. Caveat emptor though.