Quite a lot of suggestions have been posted on the TopDesk Feature Request thread in our forums, so at this point I’d like to take a moment to clarify my position how additional features will be handled.
I’m wary of adding any additional functionality to software that’s a either subset of existing functionality or that differs slightly from existing functionality, or any configuration options that don’t have a real impact on the functionality of the software, because if you do this an application tends to end up with “featuritis”, and becomes so confusing and complex that it’s no longer fit for it’s original purpose.
Examples of what I consider “featuritis”, there’s WinZip (all you want to do is zip and unzip files, so why is it so complex that it needs a configuration wizard?), and one of our competitors (I’m not going to mention names, but they had a good product that has unfortunately ceased development), who allowed users to configure almost everything about their application.
There’s nothing wrong with this approach to software for some applications, but I’m of the opinion that general-use software should just do what it says it does, and only provide configuration options that actually make a difference to the functionality of the application. After all, do users really benefit from being able to turn WinZip toolbar tooltips on or off? Couldn’t development time have been better spent on improving the zip/unzip workflow?
Getting back to the forum posts, there’s been a lot of great suggestions from users, some of which have been implemented already, and some of which will be implemented in future versions of TopDesk. However, if it’s found that adding a feature means introducing additional complexity, the feature will be dropped without ceremony. The challenge for me is to keep improving TopDesk while still keeping it simply useful software.
Update 19/08/05: I’ve seen a couple of posts on our forums that talk about how we’re into making simple software. I’d just like to clarify that this isn’t the case. What we’re about is making sure that software that may be complicated for us to develop is simple for others to use.