Torrent or not torrent, that is the question!

"Get a notepad application"

Download.com have now been listing K-Pad for a couple of weeks, though you'd have to be Hercule Poirot to find it on their site without typing "K-Pad" into the search. It's buried somewhere to the end of their 50+ pages of "Business Software: Word Processing" catergory. Why there? Honestly, because they didn't have a more-suitable category for me to place it.

As an exercise in boredom, I've just searched through, and it's on page 45. Its current tagline is "Get a notepad application" - which has to be the most unappealing caption they could have come up with. I'm amazed it has actually gotten 8 downloads with that! (Okay, it hasn't, one of them was mine, to test!)

I don't want to moan at download.com. If I could afford one of their subscription packages, I'm sure (well, I'd hope) they'd make more effort promoting it. At least it's there. An old version, anyway.


A legal torrent - say it's not so?!

But anyway, I had an idea yesterday to use torrents to distribute K-Pad. So I uploaded to Demonoid.com, certainly one of the better sites, and twiddled my thumbs to see what the reaction would be.

To date (writing this the morning after) I've had 25 downloads! I'm absolutely over the moon!!! Ha-ha! No comments at all yet, which is frustrating but not unexpected (my short-term goal now is to have received one comment - hopefully, a positive one - by next Monday).

Now, here's the interesting thing: although I linked to this blog with a screenshots link, and this blog, of course, has a download button with the exact same file that the torrent is distributing, people still prefer the torrent!

(Of course, a few more people could have downloaded directly from here, for all I know. I hope so! :-) )

So, maybe they didn't see the download link, or maybe they think the torrent has a "cracked" version (which it doesn't, since no crack is necessary for K-Pad)? I thought about my experiences with BitTorrent. Sometimes I "trust" a site like Demonoid more than the original site, not least because it's wholly independent and people can comment if there's something wrong with the program.

Regardless: I now see BitTorrent as the most effective way to distribute K-Pad, and get the word out.


Ze Annoying Bug

Releasing the torrent has also (unfortunately) reminded me of one of my tester-rules: no matter how well you test, if there's a bug, you won't see it until you show someone else. This morning, ironically while prepping a new screenshot for a torrent release to another torrent site, I discovered an annoying bug in the tables code for large numbers, and the to-do. But what to do about the fix? My choices:

1. add it to 1.1.6 and hope nobody notices;
2. rush a release of 1.1.7;
3. issue a quick fix.

I opted for 3. This means, for now, I won't be releasing the torrent to any other sites. Not until 1.1.7, anyway.