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Originally Posted by Charles Patrick
I see one person reporting a problem with the program. Are there others?
Is there anyone who has tried the program that says it does not provide value?
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I'll try it when I get home; work has the site blocked. (No idea why. But it may be the concept of "free software;" work has most of those blocked.) However, it's not a "30 second download" for me; it's 10-15 minutes depending on how fast my dialup connection is working that day.
The other comments make me concerned that it may not work for me at all--it may time out on a dialup connection. Fortunately, my interest in mainstream news is limited, so I'm not worried about "missing out"--I'm looking at this as an opportunity to expand my interests to content carried on websites that take too long to load for me to look at them normally. News articles without flashing GIFs and click-for-next-page links might be what it takes for me to get my news from something other than the Daily Kos.
(I've gotten better. I used to get my news from metaquotes.livejournal.com.)
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I'm a bit surprised by the confrontational attitude about something that can be free and beneficial to forum members.
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It smacks of deceit. There's a difference between, "hey, I found this cool new web freebie!" and "hey, I made this cool new web freebie!"
Kovidgoyal is a firm supporter of Calibre--but he doesn't try to hide that he's biased; of course he thinks it's great; its features are perfectly aligned with his preferences, and adding features for other people comes after feedback. (And he wants other people to be happy with it, so he modifies it often. But he knows that what he thinks "works just fine" may not be fine for other people.)
The website reads like hype--Here's A Great New Free Thing!!!--with no technical details, no list of actual features, no mention of the differences between the basic & more advanced version. And for a startup/just-past-beta-edition, that's okay... but don't take it as hostility when interested people ask for the details the website doesn't provide.
This forum's active members may have more technical expertise than News2PDF expects its users to have. This forum also has plenty of people who don't have that expertise, who rely on the experts to analyze new ebook tools and let them know what's most relevant to them: will I *like* using this? Is it easy *for me* to use? Will the content be useful to me?
If you've got technical details, and you don't think they'd be bad for sales/downloads (and if you do, you shouldn't be pushing the product)--maybe set up a section of the site for that info. Explain that for subscription-only websites, it can't download; it doesn't replace the subscription. Explain what kinds of filters it has--does it grab *every* news article by that site in the last day (or three days, or whatever), or can you filter by category or keyword? If I only want "business news," can I get that and avoid the election stuff? (Or vice versa?)
Set up an area for "known glitches" so you can mention that you're working to fix them. If you've got lots of interaction time available, make a page where people can leave comments--which means you'll be bombarded with questions/comments like "Why can't I read this on my MP3 player?" and "this sucks! It doesn't show flash videos!"--which tech-savvy people will happily ignore.
For a lot of us, privacy is important. So "free Basic... more with registration!" instantly triggers questions about, "How much nuisance code has been added to the Basic version to 'encourage' registration or purchase?" (Since that's a *very* common trait for freeware/shareware, it's not an unreasonable thought. "Free, with annoying popups every 5 minutes/10 uses" is a strong negative feature.