HIn other words, use your own app frequently. I think that that naturally will reveal features that could be implemented, some of them easily of course, to great benefit to users who you might not originally intended to use the app.
Let me give you an example: I like to use text-to-speech, since I can then do other things. For books, this is usually not an issue. But for text on the web, say, I've been less than impressed.
One app that I thought came close was iSpeech. Instead of requiring me to select and right-click on text, it created neat little buttons in the corner of each paragraph. The other things I tested either required me to select and right click the text, or, even worse, copy-paste it into their app.
However, iSpeech has two features: read from article, or read paragraph. I realize that this is probably what is most important for most of their users.
But, if they had used it themselves frequently, I think they would have realized that there should be a "read from paragraph" option. After all, who wants to hear the table of contents of a Wikipedia article?
I don't usually prove that solutions are simple, but I spent less than an evening fixing this myself - not patching the actual plugin but creating a separate work-around. After some consideration I decided to also use the "Readability" plugin (which should have had the option to remove fluff, so I had to add that also).
So, I wrote a Chrome plugin that removes elements matching the following JQuery selectors:
".entry-origin",
".entry-meta",
".toc",
".mw-editsection",
".reference",
"figure",
"#References",
".reflist",
"#External_links",
".external",
".sistersitebox"
and that creates a paragraph inside the current paragraph that is positioned way outside the page so that "read paragraph" in effect becomes "read from paragraph".
Here is the public gist:
https://gist.github.com/flyrev/9eab13cd7ecf5e43bddf714fb612d9fc
and here is the repository on GitHub:
https://github.com/flyrev/chrome-talk-plugin
My extension limits the URLs the plugin fires, which the original project should have also have been able to do under "preferences". (And I had to open a different tab and search after their web page to find their "contact support" information!)
Let me give you an example: I like to use text-to-speech, since I can then do other things. For books, this is usually not an issue. But for text on the web, say, I've been less than impressed.
One app that I thought came close was iSpeech. Instead of requiring me to select and right-click on text, it created neat little buttons in the corner of each paragraph. The other things I tested either required me to select and right click the text, or, even worse, copy-paste it into their app.
However, iSpeech has two features: read from article, or read paragraph. I realize that this is probably what is most important for most of their users.
But, if they had used it themselves frequently, I think they would have realized that there should be a "read from paragraph" option. After all, who wants to hear the table of contents of a Wikipedia article?
I don't usually prove that solutions are simple, but I spent less than an evening fixing this myself - not patching the actual plugin but creating a separate work-around. After some consideration I decided to also use the "Readability" plugin (which should have had the option to remove fluff, so I had to add that also).
So, I wrote a Chrome plugin that removes elements matching the following JQuery selectors:
".entry-origin",
".entry-meta",
".toc",
".mw-editsection",
".reference",
"figure",
"#References",
".reflist",
"#External_links",
".external",
".sistersitebox"
and that creates a paragraph inside the current paragraph that is positioned way outside the page so that "read paragraph" in effect becomes "read from paragraph".
Here is the public gist:
https://gist.github.com/flyrev/9eab13cd7ecf5e43bddf714fb612d9fc
and here is the repository on GitHub:
https://github.com/flyrev/chrome-talk-plugin
My extension limits the URLs the plugin fires, which the original project should have also have been able to do under "preferences". (And I had to open a different tab and search after their web page to find their "contact support" information!)
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