Saturday, December 05, 2009

How Not to Ask For A Feature

"best RDP" reviews my Signal GH iPhone app for HDHomerun

Title: "piece of junk"
Body:"This thing is worthless until they add QAM cable scanning capabilities."


First of all, the "they" is me, Glenn Howes—father of two, husband, software engineer, PhD Chemist, and occasional iPhone developer. I have made a grand total of $392.05 on this app, yet still found the time to release 2 updates to it when it made absolutely no monetary sense to do so. My work is not junk, it is of the highest engineering quality I could make it. I've spent hours tracking down bugs, ran static analysis of the code, put the executable through performance instruments for memory allocations and performance, and optimized the launch time. I did this when I had other paying projects waiting my time because I like this little app and I want it to be as perfect as I can make it.

It just lacks a feature you desire, a feature which is neither promised nor implied by the product description in iTunes. If you had e-mailed me requesting this feature, I would have seriously considered including it even though an app, who's primary function is monitoring antenna signal quality is not going to be very interesting looking at digital cable traffic. Now, I'm not inclined to add this feature, and you have only your bad social skills to blame.