Tim Metz

Windows Discrimination

#30 Windows Discrimination

This series is about what we’re learning, observing and experiencing while building our startup Saent (pronounce “Saint”). The good, the bad and especially the ugly, each time in under 5 minutes reading time.

I started working on Mac in early 2002. Until then, I had always used Windows computers, and I had only ever even seen a Mac twice before: once at my uncle’s house (he’s a photographer), and the designer at the web company I was working for had one (for reasons unknown to me at the time).

Then I started work as a video editor at DanceTrippin, an electronic music video platform. When I got the job, I was a long-time user of Adobe Premiere. But DanceTrippin had me switch to Apple’s Final Cut Pro, because, they assured me, it was “a 100 times better than Premiere.” At first I was skeptical, but I quickly fell in love. My transformation to Mac had begun.

This is by no means intended as a Mac versus Windows discussion (as sensitive a subject for many as politics or religion). On the contrary: I want to make clear I stumbled on Mac by accident, and was not necessarily drawn to it because of the brand or beautiful design or because “creative people use Macs.” I did take a liking to Apple over the years, but I’m not “against” Windows. Even so, OS (Operating System) discrimination has managed to take hold at Saent….

Saent for Windows

As we shared with our early customers last week, we’ve run into some noteworthy issues with the Windows version of the Saent desktop application:

  1. Connecting our hardware to Windows over Bluetooth (natively) proved next to impossible (at least for a small startup like ours).
  2. The piece of software that helps the hardware communicate with the desktop application is unstable under certain circumstances.
  3. The Windows desktop application has more bugs than the Mac OS X app.

In hindsight, this is not surprising. It’s not that we did not test the Windows version at all, but since each of the core Saent team members use Mac computers, the OS X version has naturally gotten five to ten times more testing hours than the Windows edition. While we only need a handful of such hours for each new update take out the obvious bugs, it takes continuous usage to uncover the deeper problems, such as performance and stability issues. Our Windows version certainly lags behind here. This has to change.

Our first step has been to call for some dedicated Windows users to help us out, and we’ve had lots of response on that. With this group we hope to achieve several things:

  1. Find bugs.
  2. Find inconsistencies.
  3. “De-Macify” the app.

That last point might need some clarification: while bugs and inconsistencies need to be resolved through more intensive testing, the Windows version suffers from another problem: it looks like a Mac application in some ways; the Settings panel, the way notifications come up, and so on. These kinds of issues can only be caught by people who are inherently familiar with Windows and know how these features should look natively on the latest Windows OS.

It’s not enough

While this dedicated tester group is step in the right direction, I’ve come to realize it’s not enough. While on Mac the main issue currently seems to be the onboarding (i.e., demonstrating right away what makes Saent valuable and how to use the core features), the Windows issues are much more fundamental: memory leaks, Saent getting in the way of other applications, features not working as advertised. Clearly this is not acceptable, and we owe it to our Windows users to make it right (and I know we can, as we do have a great development team, and this is really a matter of attention and priorities).

So I’ve decided to go back to my old ways and will purchase a Windows computer this week, so that I can spend at least 50% of my time working on Windows going forward!

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