Univers Mac & Tower of Hanoi; reviewing free software

A journalist from the french version of MacWorld, Univers Mac wrote me this morning, asking if it was OK to include Tower of Hanoi in their "virtual CD." Apparently they work much like our version of MacWorld - they include a link in the front pages of the magazine to a website that contains items mentioned in the magazine. I guess it's probably easier and cheaper than cutting a real CD every month.

Of course I said "yes." Who wouldn't? It really made my day, though I can't get too impressed with myself, it may just mean that there isn't a lot of software available in France.

The numbers for Man Handler are good, apparently it is something that people need. Between MacUpdate, VersionTracker, and Scriptbuilders it passed 1,000 dl's today and it's only been out a little over 24 hours.

I read a couple of unkind reviews of Tower of Hanoi today, but nothing as bad as one I got a while back for Romulan Hunt. It's hard not to take it personally when people are unkind to something you've put a lot of effort into. And some of the comments are directly attributable to things I have no control over like the slowness of AppleScript. And I think people forget that it's free software, that I do this as a hobby, and they're not "out" anything if they don't like the program.

I try to keep perspective, though. After all, if these few reviews were accurate, then people wouldn't be downloading them so much and I'd be getting more nasty comments. So obviously someone likes them. But people are much quicker to criticize than to praise, in my experience.