1.2.0 is out…and how to get feedback from your users – quickly!

the change-log itself looks scary But of course we’re not sleeping: the 1.2.1 beta1 is already available in the forum, featuring the long awaited Auto-categorization rules.

We’re fans of the excellent a smart bear blog, and we got inspiration from this article about getting feedback from the users.

How did we implement it? How long did it take?

What we needed was a way to have a user communicating with us what was wrong with Tabbles, this should have included a list of options with check-boxes as well as a few empty fields to write something into. Coding this into our desktop app would have been a nightmare (open a socket, and write into a remote db making sure that the user’s firewall wouldn’t get too angry about it… ) and it would have been even worst having the thing to run when the user was uninstalling…

Well, our website is based on Joomla, so we thought: why not using joomla to do this? Joomla has a built-in poll, but it’s pretty limited: only radio buttons, no free-writing field and max 12 questions (!).

After a 5 minutes tour in the joomla extensions directory I found the excellent PollXT which does exactly what I needed and within 10 mins our poll was online. This looks like the best component I’ve seen in a while… it does everything it’s supposed to (and as you need more, it’s there already), it’s stable and very intuitive: A+ to the author! Uh, did I mention that it’s donationware?

All we did is calling a custom action on uninstalling, so the uninstaller calls a web page (which opens without ringing any alarm bell) and PollXT does all the rest.

P.S.: there is in an interview of me here