Uninstall Feedback Oct 26, 2007

All Jitbit programs, when being uninstalled, ask the user, if she/he would like to leave us some feedback. I beleive that every mISV should add uninstall feedback to their product since it's simple and valuable. Even if only 1 user of 10 will leave some feedback, it will give you some food for thought.

But remember to make it optional for your user! Never launch a browser or perform any network activity without asking the user. For example, here is the message shown when someone uninstalls our Macro Recorder:


Still, many users do not read these messages. That's why we receive feedback like this:

"actually, I was just uninstalling to move to my new pc, but ANY site that forces me to visit their site WITHOUT ASKING me, is a site I (and ALL of my Internet friends) will avoid in the future. Your loss!!!!!!!!! Trust me!!"

Makes me sad.

13 spoiled programs Oct 18, 2007

In the software industry a program's new version is often worse than the previous one. Instead of becoming a better (faster, simpler and more powerful) software application over time, it turns into an over-sized monster, loaded with tons of useless features, bells and whistles. How about a hard disk defragmenter that can read email? It is quite possible according to Jamie Zawinski and his law that states that "every program attempts to expand until it can read mail".

PC World magazine has compiled a list of 13 of "earlier-is-better" software applications. Including (at no surprise):

• Windows Media Player (reason why many people use Media Player Classic)
• ICQ
• QuickTime
• iTunes
• and more, read on...

That's something we will try to avoid here at Jitbit, doing our best to develop neat software. If you ever find some of our tools too complicated, overloaded, slow or trying to be "everything for everyone", please send us some severe feedback.

Net Profile Switch update Oct 16, 2007

Another small note about the recent release of Net Profile Switch - version 5.31.

One of our customers, Paul, who works as a network support engineer, suggested a very good feature. If the tool is used to switch network settings mostly on notebooks, it has to offer a backup/restore (or "import/export") functionality for the profiles. Hard disk failures are very common on laptops, so there has to be a way to backup all the network profiles.

Another point would be that a helpdesk engineer can create a set of network profiles, export it to a file and deploy the file to a number of other computers in the organization, creating the same set of profiles for every user.

The new version of the network profile manager also fixes the network drives editor, which had problems removing drives from the list sometimes. Thanks to Andrew, who reported this issue.

Routine Oct 12, 2007

It's been a while since my last post, but I guess it's OK considering how busy we have been this week.

Our Macro Recorder software has been featured at GiveAwayOfTheDay for 24 hours. People have made some quite reasonable comments, so we had a lot of ideas how to improve our Macro Recorder. We are already working on a new version which will fix the context-menu positioning, add some new macro commands and more.

We have also released fresh versions of Jitbit ASP.NET Forum, which fixes some critical errors under MySQL, and System Purifier which improves its performance.

Macro Recorder helps Canadian police Oct 2, 2007

We are happy to announce that Saskatoon Police Service is now using our Macro Recorder to help them more effectively fight online sexual exploitation of children. We are really happy to help them catch child molesters. Those sick bastards have to be stopped. Of course, the software is provided free-of-charge.

Today's Link-List:

• Very funny online game - Web 2.0 company simulator.
• Multiple IE is a great tool that allows web-developers to test their web apps in different IE versions.