Probably not, although in the sense that's the whole point
of the exercise. This was my first experience with running a beta for a product. I started my professional life
in technology on the IT side of the business. It's interesting how the
objectives of a product’s beta and release candidate phases are the same as an
IT solutions user acceptance testing, pilot, and parallel phases - to get the
product/solution ready for use. But with an IT solution, your customer has
already purchased the item, in many cases your users are contractually
obligated to test, and there are often very large gaps between the objectives
of your customer (the executive with the checkbook), and the needs and desires
of your users (the people actually interacting with the software). For a
product those conditions and distinctions simply aren't true.
The first beta of QuickSwitch is now over. We got some
really good feedback, but unfortunately a number of users were unable to even
try the beta because of installation problems. The second beta of QuickSwitch, the speech based interface
for window management, will be starting today. If you are a user of Dragon
NaturallySpeaking you can still sign up.
In addition to fixing installation
issues, we've cleaned up a whole host of presentation and reliability
issues as
well as added a new feature - in addition to switching tasks based on a
menu preview, you can now switch directly based on the index of your
task in the taskbar. We'll get some
videos up shortly to demonstrate these two features.
This phase is limited to the functionality in QuickSwitch Basic. The window placement, windows
sizing, and mouse control functionality will be available in a separate edition - QuickSwitch Complete.
