Brent Simmons, programmer of RSS reader NetNewsWire, has some tips on how to make software feature requests. They're based on his own experiences fielding such requests, but they seem fairly generalizable, rhetorically speaking. Here's one of about seven or eight tips he has:
The “I consider the lack of feature x a bug” ploy
When you’d like to see a feature, you can’t make it happen faster by telling me you consider the lack of a feature a bug. It’s clever, yes, but not the nth time. I really do classify stuff by bugs and features, and a feature really is a feature. (Yes, some features are obvious to-dos, but they’re still features.)
Much more in Simmons' post. It's a basic course in rhetoric.
(I'll plug NetNewsWire here—I've spent 5 - 15 hours a week using it for several years; it's what I use, along with companion package MarsEdit, to skim several hundred RSS feeds a day and to post to Datacloud. I like them both so much I paid the fee to upgrade to the pro versions years ago—$40 total, I think—and haven't regretted it.)
[via inessential.com]
Posted by johndanseven at April 15, 2006 10:19 PM