This is just an idea and like most of my ideas it’s probably not going to reach implementation.
There should be a way for people to vote on whether they would like to see (or would never use?) a particular feature. I’m not sure if this website supports the idea of voting on things or not.
Let’s start with existing features. All existing “triggers”, all existing “conditions”, and all existing “actions” should be the starting point for this list. Perhaps the vote should be on a scale of -3 to +3. So for example I can think of a few actions that I use constantly (IF, WHILE, SPEAK TEXT, etc.) and I would always vote +3 on them. Then there are some that I have never used and I would vote -1 on those (iTunes controls, MIDI controls, etc), but only -1 because I think I may use them someday.
Then let there be some potential features to vote on. Perhaps these ideas should be limited to things that Peter approves. But perhaps not, since they aren’t guaranteed features. I’ve got a couple of big features I’d like to see. I won’t mention them here because I know Peter is considering them and I want to respect him by keeping those ideas private for now.
If we had a way to vote that would give Peter lots of useful feedback. Moreover, the results don’t have to be published, although I would hope to see at least whether there were more positives or negatives for a given feature.
I don’t really base my development on the number of people who like an idea. For one thing, this forum (or any location for this sort of vote) would be an incredibly small and atypical sample set.
I am happy to get ideas, and they are noted down, but a vote on a feature is of little value - the question is more how many people will get value out of the feature (which is only very loosely related to how many people would vote for the feature), how much value they would get, how much effort it would take to build, how marketable it is, how much complexity it would add, how well it integrates (or better yet amplifies) with other features, how much I particularly want the feature, and so on.
So by all means, post your suggestions, people are welcome to pile on if they like, but that additional “voting” is only a tiny part of the decision process for what is done next, so its not (IMHO) useful to have a User Voice-like feature voting system. At best it would take a fair amount of value and provide little benefit, and at worst it ends up with features that are well regarded by the voters, but which I can’t or won’t implement.
OK, fair enough. My heart was in the right place, I was just trying to help. I’ll post more of my suggestions on this website then. Thanks for the explanation as to your decision making process for new features.
I would guess the vast majority of features implemented in Keyboard Maestro come from specific suggestions. Other features come from customer support (eg the Assistance window), or a combination of both, taking suggestions/problems and then implementing a completely different solution to resolve the problem.
Customers will often ask for a specific solution to a problem, when actually there is a better way such that it is not a problem at all. For example, a customer my ask for a progress window for performing some slow task, when really the solution is to make the task fast enough that no progress window is needed. So even if your particular suggestion isn’t implemented, it doesn’t mean it hasn’t gone in to the thought process of how to move Keyboard Maestro forward.
