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Best Practices - iCAP’s Release Meter FINALLY Does The Right Thing
**We interrupt the regularly-scheduled post for this time-sensitive news flash.** To be fair, I 
need to cover this because I want my coverage of the company to be fair and balanced.
Here’s what happened: looking through my site stats, I noticed an unusual trend over the last 2 weeks. A lot of people were landing on my blog after using the search engines to get more information on the iCAP Release Meter.
That means they were hitting all my posts from last summer where I hammered the company and product for a whole series of Worst Practices.
Check out the Related Posts below this one to see the list to see what I mean.
Well, they finally did the right thing and last month iCAP Technologies finally released a much-needed update and brought the Release Meter out of
the beta Stone Age into Release Candidate heaven — Release Meter 2.0.
Cool! Bravo. Much applause. No seriously, they did a great job updating the interface and a good deal of behind-the-scene tweaks.
A Few Of My Favorite Things
Here are some of my favorite improvements in 2.0:
New Location Bar, so you always know where you are in the app (new here, but in the beta versions, this was a problem). 
Another favorite feature is the new Graph Meter View Option, now you can see the ranges I’m hitting instead of mentally keeping track of what the high and low ranges are. 
Very cool, iCAP guys, and I’m very happy you didn’t call them “lizard” and “wizard” zones.
There are a host of other feature improvements that I’ll let you check out for yourselves.
You can click here to read more about the new version.
But The Bad News Is . . .
If you’re a long-time user of the Release Meter, you’re going to lose all of your settings, your scores, charts — the whole kitandkaboodle. This was just a minor inconvenience/annoyance for me because I also kept my scores in an Excel spreadsheet so I could use its charting features to track my progress over time.
Still . . . that was annoying. iCAP could have easily created an app to import the old settings.
And the spin they tried to apply to this was laughable, “We believe that you’ll find the new software so simple and inspiring to use that you won’t miss the old scores for a moment.”
Yeah, right. I think you guys need a better belief about that. Here’s one to get you started off on the right foot — what do you customers believe?
Okay . . . so that was my grumble, and apart from some other minor bugs — I’m happy with 2.0. I still use the Release Meter in my journey to imperturbability and providing there are no hidden bugs that have yet to bite me in the ass, I’ll be recommending it.
So looking at my totally subjective scorecard — a pat on the back for a job well done on moving it out of beta with a stunningly cool 2.0 interface. And with my other hand, a slight Whap! up the side of the head for not bringing over the old scores and settings.
Of course, prodding iCAP into doing the right thing by customers who made the hefty investment in their product was (and is) a thankless job, but someone had to do it. I’m just happy that given all the bad (but nonetheless true) press I gave them, they sent my the 2.0 upgrade CD just like a regular customer.
And though I said this throughout my expose series, it bears repeating here — my intent the entire time was to produce positive change.
Now if the company can “release” its addiction to spasmodic, stone-knives-and-bearskins marketing — the rest of the world may get a chance to find out how effectively it can improve their lives.
By Walter |
Topics: Lessons Learned, Pro Analysis |
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