I'm not writing this because I think that UserLand or Dave need any kind of defence, especially by me, but because I've had the privilege of working with UserLand (or better: as a UserLand customer) for some time and because most of the work that we do at evectors is based on UserLand technology.

Customers support

Most of the thumbs down comments were about lack of customer support from UserLand. As far as Radio is concerned, this is simply not true.

Just check the posts on the Radio UserLand Discussion Group. Most of them (even the obvious ones) get a reply, and most of the posts contain at least one reply from somebody of the UserLand staff.

Maybe something that UserLand should do about this is give more evidence to posts done by UserLand staff members. If somebody is new to the community and the discussion group, he/she might not know that, for example, Lawrence Lee is a UserLand employee.

And Radio is really an easy to install and use application.

Just a couple of days ago a friend called me on the phone to discuss totally different things, and during the conversation he told me something about outliners (as I discovered later, he was a More user). So I told him about Radio and the new Instant Outliners feature. Then I guided him trough the Radio web site, software download, install, opening of his weblog, software update, quick introduction to the news aggregator, initialization of his new I/O and how to subscribe to my public outline.

The total duration of the call (according to my cell phone) has been 48 minutes, and we probably discussed at least 15 minutes before getting to outliners.

Now, consider for a while what this person has actually done in about half an hour:

• downloaded and installed a web server
• created a public web site
• started a news aggregator
• got a new form of communication (the I/O) working

Pretty impressive, uh?

And, btw, have you had better support on a $40 application from any other software company? Microsoft? Intuit? Adobe? Apple? It didn't happen to me.

Evolution

Other people complain about UserLand never finishing their software. This is also not true. At least from my POV, UserLand has always been evolving their products. There is a very clear line going from Frontier to Clay Basket, to Manila and to Radio. Of course, most of the time the evolution has brought from one product to the other without fixing all bugs. Yeah, so what? Were all Windows 98 bugs fixed before moving to 2000? I find current UserLand software (Frontier and Radio) very stable and reliable, there are some issues that can be addressed, but there are hundreds of fixes that have been released on these applications and they keep getting better on literally daily bases.

Dealing with Dave

As far as having to deal with Dave (the last common complaint) well... it's true that sometimes he might not be the easiest person to discuss with. But at least from what I have been able to see, this does not happen if you report a bug, but if try to attack him on what he has done or what he should do next.

Now, does this mean that everybody should be afraid to post a question on UserLand support discussion groups? Given the number of daily posts, the community hardly thinks so.

This is the way UserLand works, you have the opportunity to plug into the CEO's mind and to follow day by day (or even hour by hour) his opinions and UserLand work on a one of the first weblogs of the web.

Even if I don't always agree with opinions expressed on Scripting.com, to me this approach is a huge value: it's a source of food for thoughts and it's not the kind of opportunity you get with many other companies.

I think that some of those comments are coming from developers who had some problems with Dave or UserLand, but they have nothing to do with Radio, which is a revolutionary application that has still a lot of things to show us.

Paolo Valdemarin