Progam with QDA Qualitative Data Analysis features? Coding/tagging blocks of text?

Posted by Fredy
Aug 7, 2012 at 03:17 PM

Doctorandus, glad you overcame your procrastination issue. ;-)

Alec, you’re right, there is no correlation between sw price and help / service / development issues at first sight since there are notable exceptions, and other factors that blur the picture. Then, I didn’t pretend there was, but I differentiated - not clearly enough I must say - between “corporate” sw (NoteMap, MindManager - sw bought by (often large) corporations or by legal entities in order to do business work - sometimes they ar not well served, as in the case of NoteMap, but they prefer buying third-rate sw from their usual source: here, LexisNexis, instead of buying much better sw from “less reliable sources”) and sw bought by individuals (may they be able to deduct it from their tax bill or not).

And I said, or wanted to say, these have become two different markets, with rather tiny intersection, in fact, less and less so. And within that second (!) market, most developers have ceased to do serious work, and I pretend that’s for complete disenchantment with individual buyers’ buying habits. (MS Office Student & Home = about 90 dollars for the whole family: 3x Word, 3x Excel, 3x their outliner nobody wants… and without Outlook, e.g., let alone Access - compare with 1x (!) Word alone, ca. 1990, ca. 900 DM = ca. 1200 euro today’s worth.)

In such an environment (of which the applics market is the most obscene deformity), individual developers ain’t able anymore to insist on a bit viable prices, and only a few succeed with replacing this “individuals” market by making an access to the “corporation” market, many of them for lack of quality, and almost all of them getting withheld by the above-described phenomenon of corporations preferring lesser sw by more renowned developers (hence the invariable “We’ll give it to the developers” in 1-man developers’ help forums).

So there are some niches left: crm, macros / text expanders, Outlook add-ons, and several others - editors were such a niche decades ago.

Btw, your MyInfo example is a perfect one for SIMILI-development, in order to please people that are not too demanding = developers pretending only to listen to their customers (and it’s a good example for another phenomenon I saw here: charging in dollars, being in East Europe, while corresponding U.S. “addresses” give up):

- hadn’t second pane; is with one for some 18 months now, not editable and not even dockable so that either you buy a second monitor in order to use it or go bonkers
- hadn’t good print / export facilities but pretended to have these within the help file only; the corresponding features couldn’t be checked for since they were greyed out in the trial; after buying, Petko said, oh yes, was planned (= rare example of a help file being ahead of actual development when it’s normally the other way round), will be done; Petko 6 months later: have no intention to do anything about these things; 2 years later: nothing been done
- had good special feature: possibility to display first 3 lines of hit items within the (search) hit table; was abolished without further notice; a “good” customer = one that even wrote a routine for importing askSam files into MI, finally asked what was going on; Petko: will be re-introduced later; feature is missing for 18 months now; say you run your little business on MI, say you rested on that fine feature (customer “Smith” calls; you search for that customer; you get 15 hits; the info within those first 3 lines will tell you which of those 15 hits to “open”); you try to revert to the (tremendously buggy) old version: I fear it’s even another format so you can’t revert without losing data?
- old version tremendously buggy, as said; many intermediate versions; all “beta” with timeout; new PAID version, so, after many versions to do away with innumerable bugs, perhaps with your big help (and certainly with your amounts of patience), you either pay, or you revert to your old, bug-ridden paid version: NO free intermediate “minor” updates then, contrary what you expected and were made to believe
- paid new version extremely bug-ridden; let’s hope this time people get free intermediate minor updates; I didn’t get any
- tags, yes; quick filter your items by just two tags, no
- attributes, yes; quick filter by more than one attribute at a time, no
- yes, there are some weird ways to do such a filtering, with LOTS of key pressings / mouse clicks, but it’s so devoid of practicability that your trying to use MI in a “productive” environment is technically possible, but it’s forcing you to do a lot of unnecessary work again and again, and it’s forcing your customers to wait for your doing so, on the phone, or in front of you; I call this unacceptable
- no Boolean search of course
- asked for a little pm system; have a look at what has been done
- I could bring many more examples, I’m just reviewing some nuisances from memory
- and yes, they introduced hoisting and amended clones creation = more or less, two years’ work - and for legal reasons, you need to call this “active development”.

Which is to say, our MI example is a perfect one in order to show WHY corporations refrain from buying sw from pop-n-mom affairs: The TOC simply will be much too high. Let alone our choice exmple, askSam, many brilliant ideas from ancient times, and so bug-ridden that anybody considering the use in any “productive” environment can’t sleep anymore for fear of total data corruption.

And yes, there are a few exceptions, as to most rules. Some individuals doing brilliant little sw for their own use, and for the benefit of others. Those are rare examples. Back to NoteMap: One-pane outliners ain’t viable, neither in a legal environment, nor anywhere else. No regrets, then. But askSam was finally bought / overtaken by its former marketing chief… instead of somebody who’d been able to make it corporation-ready: We all would have greatly profited by such a move. Or more clearly: With sw, ask yourself, are they able to rely upon an existing, large “corporate install base”. If not, let’em die without your commitment (data, time, problems, the money being the lightest part in all this).