Teaser - Polywick Story Server

Posted by James Thompson
Sep 8, 2018 at 07:21 PM

Polywick Studio wrote:

>There are strike-through because our company is also game-studio.
>The developers here also create games.
>There are artists here.
> >Do you remember the first posts?
> >What’s wrong?
> >What’s wrong with making a one-panel grid?
>See the OSX Apps and Windows app, they use the similar User-Interfaces
>(WinForms, WPF, Cocoa, Metal, etc.) and follow either Microsoft’s or
>Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines:
>https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/overview/themes/
> >All the coding was made ground-up from scratch.
>All the screenshots show a new product under development.
> >The CUA (Common User Access) Guidelines are of the same standard of any
>Windows App or OSX App.
> >For the UI, there are court-cases which have set the precedents - Lotus
>vs. Borland where -
> >1) The court made an analogy between the menu hierarchy and the
>arrangement of buttons on a VCR. The buttons are used to control the
>playback of a video tape, just as the menu commands are used to control
>the operations of Lotus 1-2-3. Since the buttons are essential to
>operating the VCR, their layout cannot be copyrighted. Likewise, the
>menu commands, including the textual labels and the hierarchical layout,
>are essential to operating Lotus 1-2-3. [Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland
>Int’l, Inc., 49 F.3d 807, 817 (1st Cir. 1995)]
> >2) The court also considered the impact of their decision on users of
>software. If menu hierarchies were copyrightable, users would be
>required to learn how to perform the same operation in a different way
>for every program, which the court finds “absurd”. Additionally, all
>macros would have to be re-written for each different program, which
>places an undue burden on users.[Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int’l,
>Inc., 49 F.3d 807, 818 (1st Cir. 1995)]
>

Kudos to you! I’m interested to follow your development progress.

Regarding the interface: I think you can ignore the complaints about it looking “old-fashioned”. Yes I’m an Ecco Pro user, but honestly, I haven’t seen a better approach to providing this kind of information on screen this concisely. It works. Why mess with what works? InfoQube is well-done - excellent work, Pierre - but I have yet to see any Outliner that presents data in this manner as efficiently on any platform.

Regarding copying Ecco Pro: brilliant! Yes, there’s a hole in the marketplace that has not been filled. It is a difficult one from a marketing standpoint, but only because users have a difficult time understanding sophisticated software that addresses difficult problems. There’s a relentless dumbing-down in the market. And Microsoft killed this product category by throwing Outlook out there for free: NetManage had made the mistake of presenting Ecco Pro as essentially an initial set of apps (calendar, contacts file…) to make it easier to understand. The market saw that and only that when they looked at Ecco Pro, and opted for that limited functionality in Outlook, for free. The category has been largely dead ever since, as you rightly point out. The closest anyone has come is in providing “notepad” apps. And, to be fair, Microsoft’s own OneNote. Which, for all those who have criticized Ecco Pro’s (& Story Server’s?) interface as “old fashioned”, is much more “modern” & up-to-date, and for this user, much more limited in what it can do. It’s a different tool than Ecco Pro. There are valid use cases for both; the point is that the way the data is presented has implications for how you can use & manipulate it.

So about the marketing conundrum: can I offer two suggestions?
1. You made an interesting allusion to GTD in a previous post on this forum. One underused feature of Ecco Pro was that it was a multi-user app, out of the box. Few firms utilized that feature. I knew of a dentist’s office that did, but that doesn’t signify much. A better example is the Wealth Management group at Royal Bank of Canada who had many tens of users running Ecco Pro as their primary workplace app on a network. I suspect record locking wasn’t available - the app is RAM-bound - so file locking was the level of data protection, but Ecco Pro has a data update feature that ensures updates to individual records could be automated on the same network. The name of your product suggests you want to leverage multi-user access somehow. There are existing notebook apps; there are existing simple outline apps for things like shopping lists or travel packing lists. There are better outliner apps for assembling/writing essays or book content - I’m thinking OneNote - but this is a poorly-served market niche. And there are GTD-oriented task tracking apps that support delegation & tracking of responsibilities & tasks, supporting both projects (discrete individual projects with a defined start-&-stop date) and workflow (ongoing day-to-day task & detail assignments). This market niche is also poorly served. I think there are opportunities here as well. And looking at the mobile market, writing a bit of code to streamline data capture & input from peripherals like bar code readers would facilitate a variety of useful applications: stock keeping, logistics, etc.

2. I think the biggest empty niche is mobile. I’ve been waiting in vain for a tablet or phone that would let me run Ecco Pro or something similar for two decades. The Android market offers nothing with any real functionality. The closest thing I’ve found thus far in the iPad market is “Circus Ponies” (I kid you not) and it’s pretty brain-dead by comparison. (And not to harp on the “dated interface” theme, but this app on iPad is a good example of the kind of limitations you run into when trying to be more “modern” and accommodate mobile screens. They’ve hit the wall on functionality, I think in part because of the interface decision, and don’t even offer the app on the iPhone).

Yes, I can now purchase a Windows-capable notebook that will actually do something: Microsoft’s Surface Go looks especially appealing, but we’re still talking $800+ Cdn. I have not been able to test Ecco Pro on it: store demonstrator models run the dumbed-down Windows S operating system which limits users to installing software from the Microsoft Store, and while you can (as a user) upgrade the box to Windows Pro once you buy it, they won’t let you do it with a demonstrator in the store. If anyone has experience running Ecco Pro or InfoQube on the Surface Go, please post. And yes, I get that the “dated interface” means finger-selecting fields could be problematic for some, but a stylus addresses that for hand-held use and for hard-core data entry & manipulation, the keyboard is the appropriate tool & works just fine.

I realize you’d probably have to design the application from the ground up for Android or Apple, but it is where the market is. Failing that the mobile market for Microsoft Windows will grow and it’s worth pursuing, especially if the code is anchored there, but it will take more time, and Microsoft’s decision not to support the phone market will be an on-going handicap. Finally: please take seriously the concern expressed by others about a proprietary database. We don’t actually care how the data is stored - that’s your business - but we want to know it’s stable, doesn’t impose unreasonable limits on data size, and above all we need to know our data won’t be held hostage. It needs to be really easy to get data in & out of Story Server in standard data formats, as it it in Ecco Pro.

Can anyone else out there suggest better ways to position & market an Ecco Pro replacement? This is almost as significant a hurdle as redeveloping the code. Meanwhile Polywick: keep us posted.