NM Collector Software

The other night while watching TV a Dominos Pizza commercial came up where they encouraged customers to complain so they can improve their pizza.  That is my attitude towards my collecting software.  If you have issues with NM Collector Software please let me know so I can improve it!

There are many ways to let me know including my public support forum.  In it are two sub forums of particular importance for improvement.  One is for reporting bugs and the other is for submitting enhancement requests.  I value both!  Please use these forums!  Don’t be afraid to post suggestions or complaints publicly so other people can read and comment on them as well.  This will help me gauge what will be of the most value in future releases.

As for bugs, no matter how hard I try to eradicate them some inevitably make it through.  NM Collector Software is not simplistic so it is very complicated code to provide the rich features that set it apart from the rest.  However, that also increases the chances that some bugs will get through.  Help me stamp them out by reporting any that you find!  Publicly reporting them is the best so that others can be easily made aware of the bugs and any workarounds to use until they can be fixed.

Enhancement requests are how I get new ideas that I might not have thought of myself!  I may not be able to incorporate all of them (for various reasons including technical and/or philosophical) but I value the suggestions.  Even though I may not be able to incorporate a suggestion directly it may lead to other improvements that I might not have thought of otherwise.  Please send your suggestions in! 

I know that my software can not be everything to everybody and there is no way that I can please everyone.  However, I do value feedback from multiple perspectives – every one has something to contribute, and, within reason, I do try to please every one who has decided to invest their time and money in my software.

Thanks in advance for your continued support in making NM Collector Software better!

Clay

I just received the following email regarding NM Gun Collector Software which I think deserves to be shared with others:

“I have been using Penguin software in the past which is not supported on Vista so I must go through this again. I realize that you do not have a crystal ball but is it your intentions to continue to support your software with the ever changing technological world we are in today?”

This is spot on as to why I changed from a Microsoft-based software development environment to a Java-based software development environment.  My old NM Gun Collector Software was written using the latest Microsoft technology available in 1999.  Microsoft promised developers using their technology that their applications  would continue to run in future Microsoft Operating systems into perpetuity.  Well, that turned out to be only partially true.

The advent of Microsoft Windows Vista resulted in changes to the installation model for applications that broke the installation of NM Gun Collector Software.   At the time, the Microsoft solution for fixing the problem entailed purchasing the latest Microsoft Development tools (at great expense), which in trun required migrating the old applications into that new development environment (requiring a very large software re-development effort), and finally redeploying the newly redeveloped application using the new Microsoft development environment.

This was too much for me to bear.  Besides the simple fact of feeling betrayed by Microsoft (which should be no surprise to anyone but I am always an optimist and tend to believe the promises of others) if I was to go through all of that effort why would I commit once again to an environment that I could not be sure would be supported in future versions of Windows?  Since I would have to redevelop my application anyway why not take another look at the available development environments with an eye towards the future?  Well, that is exactly what I did.

As a result, I decided to create NM Collector Software JE (Java Edition) as a Java application.  This offers many advantages including the easy availability of many free or low cost software development environments, the ability to deploy NM Collector Software JE to  multiple platforms (including Windows, Mac, and Linux), and the promise of longevity.  Sure, as java grows and changes I might have to tweak my application to continue to fit within the Java environment but NEVER AGAIN will I have to recreate it from scratch as Microsoft forced me to do.

However, over the many years that it has been available,  Java has stabilized so much that I do not expect to have to make a lot of changes to my application to keep it running long into the future.  So, in conclusion, here is the email response I gave to the person who asked the question:

“No for NM Gun Collector Software (the page you contacted me from).  Because it is Microsoft based the technology has proven to be unstable over time.

“Yes for  NM Collector Software JE (Java Edition).  That is exactly why I abandoned Microsoft technology in favor of Java.  Java allows me to continue to support  NM Collector Software JE not only across multiple operating systems but into the foreseeable future as well.”

You might think that as a result I left my thousands of NM Gun Collector Software customers in the same situation this poor Penguin software customer is in.  Well, if so, you would be wrong.  One of my primary goals in writing NM Collector Software JE was to provide a path for my existing customers to migrate their data into the new system so they would not have to do it manually.  Early on in the development of NM Collector Software JE I was able to meet that goal ( please see http://www.nmcollectorsoftware.com/support/Import.htm for more details ) and several of my customers have already used it.

Why have only a few done it?  Because they love NM Gun Collector Software so much they do whatever they can to keep it working on new systems.  In fact, I have helped them to come up with work arounds so as to keep it running in Vista and Windows 7.  However, I don’t know how long we can keep that up so they now have a proven path to move their data to NM Collector Software JE when they can no longer keep NM Gun Collector working on future versions of Microsoft Windows.

Clay