Feature Requests?

[gareth_w]

Hi Guys,

I realise that you have a whole bunch of work to do to get your ideas into the program and make it stable, but your in the hands of the customers now and they can be very demanding!

Are there any plans to announce features you are adding as you go, or a mechanism to allow the "great unwashed" out here to make suggestions to you?

Agreed, design by committee is always a compromise, leads to bad products, and will lead to some being dissatisfied with the result; but equally you;ve got a captive audience of paid up enthusiasts and evangelists and wouldn't it be a shame not to use that?

[Big Mac]

Are there any plans to announce features you are adding as you go, or a mechanism to allow the "great unwashed" out here to make suggestions to you?

I believe that the Kickstarter stretch goals have a full list of the OWM version 1.0 features. Perhaps you could scroll through the Kickstarter page and make a list of them.

They really need to deliver all of those features (and do the Mac OS/Linux ports) before they can move onto 1.1 features (or 1.0.1 features).

[unklStewy]

I've been working on this.. I have crawled the Kickstarter and added bullet points into a list. I'll post it

Casey

[gareth_w]

I'm not a software developer, but I've worked with them and on projects managing them. I've seen my fair share of disasters come down the line.

I've read the kickstarter and I'm fine with those goals. I wouldn't have put my money down if I wasn't.

But the thing is, I'm not interested in OWM1.0. Or even v1.1 (though I will be using them as soon as I get them). I'm really interested in v3.0 - which is generally considered when a program becomes most useful. I don't want to buy OWM now, and then MyWorldMapper next year, and MegaWorldMapper the year after that. I'm coming in at the ground and hoping to invest in the ecosystem that builds up here - and hoping that one does.

Now I know all of this is a long way off, but the thinking needs to start now, in some cases. for example, suppose you can do something to build the software in 2 ways (a and b). Later, people want function X, but you can only (easily) implement function X if you built the software by method B. IF you chose method A, you might need an expensive refactoring, or simply not deliver function X. (A quick story: one massive firm I worked for had to throw away 2 years of development on a major desktop app because the undo function wasn't implemented. They thought that they could add this in after the rest of the functionality, but turns out they could not. The user base chose to reject the software because of this)

I'm hoping that by contributing to a feature list we can start to work out a road map and this will be of use not only to us investors here, but also to the developers, and most importantly in bringing more people in.

And again, I know it's a long ways off, but it doesn't hurt to start talking around this now.

I don't want to spend too much time talking that I derail or delay development - I'm just trying to be helpful longer term.

[Kanchou]

you;ve got a captive audience of paid up enthusiasts and evangelists and wouldn't it be a shame not to use that?

That's one of the main reasons we went to Kickstarter, to hear directly from people who would use Other World Mapper

As the alpha and beta backers get to give us feedback and we get the "core" of the application working well, and most of the features we promised during the campaign, we will be asking for ideas via the forum (one of the main reasons to have to forum is to hear from you). Our hope is that we can get to ask for additional ideas before the first release, but we won't know for sure until later next year.

- Alejandro

[Big Mac]

But the thing is, I'm not interested in OWM1.0. Or even v1.1 (though I will be using them as soon as I get them). I'm really interested in v3.0 - which is generally considered when a program becomes most useful. I don't want to buy OWM now, and then MyWorldMapper next year, and MegaWorldMapper the year after that. I'm coming in at the ground and hoping to invest in the ecosystem that builds up here - and hoping that one does.

That sounds great. I'm hoping to follow along with OWM vX.X too. I'm not sure how much they can put into v1 before they have to go back and create v2, but it will be fun to find out.

Now I know all of this is a long way off, but the thinking needs to start now, in some cases. for example, suppose you can do something to build the software in 2 ways (a and b). Later, people want function X, but you can only (easily) implement function X if you built the software by method B. IF you chose method A, you might need an expensive refactoring, or simply not deliver function X. (A quick story: one massive firm I worked for had to throw away 2 years of development on a major desktop app because the undo function wasn't implemented. They thought that they could add this in after the rest of the functionality, but turns out they could not. The user base chose to reject the software because of this)

I'm hoping that by contributing to a feature list we can start to work out a road map and this will be of use not only to us investors here, but also to the developers, and most importantly in bringing more people in.

And again, I know it's a long ways off, but it doesn't hurt to start talking around this now.

I don't want to spend too much time talking that I derail or delay development - I'm just trying to be helpful longer term.

Sounds good. Obviously not being an Alpha tester, or even a Beta tester, I won't be hearing all the cool things that both of those teams feed back to the OWM team, so there could be a risk that a feature request list duplicates some of their work (or goes down a different path that the Alpha/Beta versions render irrelivant. I'm not sure if the other Kickstarter backers would count as "Gamma testers"!

But if you are happy to compile a list of features from the Kickstarter and aggriate that with information from other forum members, perhaps you can help the long term plan.

One thing we do over at The Piazza*, is make lists of useful links (websites and stuff) in topics. People add new information to the topic, and the person who "owns" the topic edits their first post and adds in new links. So that first post acts as a master list. Perhaps you could do something similar here, make a list of Kickstarter Features, and then add on a list of Alpha features, Beta features and Gamma features.

* = If you want to see an example, see my Other Warcraft Websites (& Free Downloads) sticky.

Over at the phpBB forums, they have a lot of chatter about feature requests, and have special pages about it. But that is partly because it is open source and a lot of people contribute to the code (and the testing process). If the OWM Team are not farming out some of the development work (to us) I'm not sure we would need to have anything so complex here.

But if you want to have a special "Feature request list", and if you are willing to do the donkey work looking after it, perhaps you could look for other threads talking about features and link from the main list thread to the other threads. That might allow the OWM Team to turn your list into a sticky and use you to add links to any other topics that request features.

If there was a special links-sticky like that, it would probably also be possible to add a status to every feature (like "planned for Alpha v7", "planned for Beta version", "under review by OWM Team", "new request", etc) that stop people bothering the OWM Team with the same questions.

[Kanchou]

If there was a special links-sticky like that, it would probably also be possible to add a status to every feature (like "planned for Alpha v7", "planned for Beta version", "under review by OWM Team", "new request", etc)

I like that actually, we'll try to have something like that up as we get into Alpha testing. Thanks!

- Alejandro