Some tools you just cant help loving and Anapod from redchairsoftware.com is one of them. I dislike itunes and the reason is probably because Apple doesn’t really care how bad iTunes works with PC.

Anyways, I am sure iTunes is good for some people, but not me. So I have been using Anapod and it keeps getting better and better and it sure was worth the $25 I paid especially when I was given a whole year’s of free upgrades. And since the dev team of this company seems to use some sort of agile development method, they keep churning out new versions a couple of times a month which as a user I love even though the changes are small. For instances this latest version allowed me to directly sync my outlook contacts with my contacts in the iPod, instead me having to manually export them to vCard version and then drag and drop them. Very simple feature, and awesome!

Which bring me to another related subject that I think about a lot from time to time. What makes a tool a killer application? Certain things have to be there, like user friendliness, usefulness, flexibility and a number of other things that the every developer knows about, but at the end there is probably a few competitors out there that might slow down the pace that a killer app is discovered at. For instance, if I develop tool X that does something and has Y and Z as competitors, I guess one way of winning over users from Y and Z is to give them ability to import data from Y and Z to my app, otherwise they are not going to be as keen to give up their current application and start using mine. But that is also not going to be enough I think. You also have to give the user the ability to export their settings and data to other formats so they won’t feel locked in to your application.

This might sound idiotic at first but it makes sense if you think about it. For instance, when I look at a new software, the first thing I look at after actually liking the features, is to see can I import things from a similar application I am using? And also can I export them back to the same application in case I later discover I don’t like it? If not, then forget it, because I don’t want to be locked into this new application and later on find out that I don’t like it and have to redo everything in case I want to switch.

I read an article about history of Lotus 123 and Microsoft excel the other day and I found out that Lotus 123 TOTALLY dominated the market before Excel. So what did Microsoft do? Apart from lotsa marketing that was good but didn’t really bring about the mass conversion they built in the export/import features I mentioned above and that turned out to be the key to winning most people.=20

Fire fox is an example of an app that does this half way, ie, it imports things from IE but won’t let you export things which is starting to bother me more and more. Not because I want to take my cookies and history and change browser, but because when I want to reimage my PC all that gets lost simply because they have locked me in.

I guess on a philosophical level, one could ask the question if it is matter of honesty to allow the user to come over AND leave when they want?

[Outside of my blog, I am part of the Bahá’í Faith, a movement to unit the world through spiritual principles and based on the teachings of Bahá’u’lláh.]