On Mar 17, 2005, at 11:12, Mats Persson wrote:
[...] I wonder if Allan's studies in Psychology has been instrumental to this, or whether it is just something that has grown organically ??
hehe... I might be smart, but I'm definitely not that smart ;)
Maintaining a public to do list would be very nice for the rest of us trying to peek over your shoulder, but I understand that practicalities may make it more of a chore than it's worth.
Not sure how much Allan is concerned about the competition, but I guess that's one important practicality too. Why show the competition what you're planning to do ??
Competition??? oh.. the rock stars over at BareBones ;)
Not too concerned about that ;) there are a few situations where secrecy is required (when you're in direct competition with a product similar to your own, and the developers have plenty of resources) or an advantage (when you want the press to go into wild speculations about what you're creating, because you need media attention).
Neither of this is really my situation, though another concern is that at times you are likely to get ahead of yourself when speaking of planned features, and if you delay or cut (already “announced”) features, you're likely to disappoint some -- and the picture users paint of you is rarely objective, and disappointment is never an advantage!
But for me currently, I only see being as open as possible as a competitive advantage, and I guess it's just in my nature ;)
When I said sensitive information with regard to the to-do I was thinking of personal info, like email addresses (which I do often keep for suggestions) or when I have pasted text verbatim (I do mostly consider private mails private).
Though my main concerns are still 1) the time spent maintaining a public to-do and 2) receiving questions about the items on (or missing from) the to-do (I just removed the two public to-dos from macromates.com because these alone generated too many questions).
And then there is the fact that this to-do is really not very interesting ;) I don't write detailed descriptions of what I plan, only brief reminders for the things I may otherwise forget. E.g. redoing the project drawer doesn't appear on the list, even though I have a lot of cool ideas for that ;)