It’s been a few weeks since I released thoughtex, and thanks to some kind words from a few folk like Frank, Scott, Glav and Ryan a number of people have tried it out. One thing I built into thoughtex was some feature usage monitoring. After being inspired by the massive amounts of user session data that the office team collect, and as a big fan of the general principle of measuing and finding out rather than speculating I thought this was an absolutely necessary feature to build in. Although the number of times the users changed the sytle of a node in my pet project is probably not of great interest to you, dear readers there was one set of stats taht I did collect that might be of broader interest - client capabilities. Here are some graphs of various metrics.
Breakdown of Operating System Types
(this is naturally somewhat selective since WPF, the platform my app runs on is only available for Windows Vista, XP SP2 and Server 2K3) 
Number of Cores
Render Tier
(measured by WPF - a broad indication of the client graphics capabilities. 0 = worst, 2 = best)
Tablet PC?
Screen Size
(this is the available screen size of the primary monitor, so it excludes space taken up by the start bar, and doesn’t include the whole desktop size in multi-monitor setups)
| Smallest 932x640 |
Average 1423x998 |
Largest 2561x1601 |
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The key things I took away from this (other than I need to get a 4-core system with a 2561x1601 monitor) is that I was interested in how many people had upgraded to Vista. Given the audience who read Ryan/Frank’s blog this is probably not that surprising. I was also slightly surprised at just how dominant multi-core systems are now. A lot of the single-core systems were also reporting render tier 0, suggesting they don’t have a real graphics card. I wonder if these are virtual machines (since I believe VMs have both these characteristics). Also it seems I shouldn’t go nuts implementing tablet-centric features.
For those interested, the number of data points was between 1K and 10K. I know these numbers are probably heavily skewed by the population of people who tried out my app, but I’ll certainly keep an eye on these stats when designing features as more “non-alpha-geek“ users (hopefully) start using my application.
Comments
In terms of your usage statistics - they’re interesting, but given it’s only been a few weeks since your application has been released your pie charts are unsuprising. (Early adopters, etc). What would be more interesting is monitoring the change in operating system types over time: would there be an increase in XP users? etc.
I’d also speculate that a number of users have laptops, explaining the screen resolution statistics (and potentially Teir 0 information). I’m using a Tablet at the moment, for instance…
Just a suggestion for your program - I’d greatly appreciate greater keyboard accessibility. For me, this would be the #1 improvement you could make (incidentally, using Yahoo! Web Services to grab related information was an inspired, and very cool, move). You can copy Freemind’s implementation (which is rather good). Unless I’m wrong, there’s no way to create a new subnode from the keyboard, or a node at the same level.
Two long term goals would be (1) to add Ink capabilities (notation - drawing all over the mind map - would be the best implementation. How cool would it be to make a mindmap, then scribble all over it?) and (1) allow for greater export/save issues. PDF would be ideal, for example.
Nice work; great program.