Everyday I learn stuff from smart people. I got an Flickr E-Mail from Bernie Goldbach. He had found me either via JD Lasica or the G'Day Podcast.
Bernie told me via Skype this morning that he had heard of ActiveWords a while back, but had put the idea of trying our stuff aside for another day.
I pitched him, and he seems to like what he sees, but he taught me a good lesson. Whenever he is looking at trying something, he goes to A9 (the search engine) and types in say "ActiveWords" and "problem" to see if anyone has written or blogged about a product and any related problems.
He didn't find any negative comments and hence became motivated to take a hard look at what we are doing.
Smart guy, good idea, one that I will put in my bag of tricks.
It's too bad Bernie couldn't search in the Microsoft MVP private newsgroups. People have had some bad things to say about Activewords there recently.
Posted by: MVP | December 24, 2004 at 02:34 PM
I've got plenty of caustic comments on ActiveWords sourced on mailing lists populated by Irish developers and they fill my bilge tanks with issues related to value for money, registry edits, and work flow analysis. ActiveWords won't work if you don't think shortcuts are important enough to learn keystrokes or key words. However, if your game is shortening your work flow in a job that rewards you with longer breaks between suspenses, then ActiveWords will get you through your workload faster. Granted, my impressions are only my own and it's certainly a fact that the program has its detractors. But as this blog item points out, the A9 and Google trawls are hard pressed to find hordes who denigrate the program. I know those who do but like the developers inside MSDN, they're often power users wrapped inside private newsgroups. Their opinions are worthwhile, but simply not mainstream enough to fit in the context of the reviews I normally write for the technology sections of Irish newspapers.
Posted by: Bernie Goldbach | December 27, 2004 at 01:38 PM
MVPs have bad things to say about ActiveWords? What is they don't like?
Posted by: Peter J. Weldon | December 27, 2004 at 04:49 PM
Try gmail problem wow lots of entries there
Posted by: Trevor Cook | December 29, 2004 at 12:24 PM