Few days ago I noticed that WinMerge total downloads have reached four million. WinMerge was also in top 100 most downloaded software in Sourceforge.net.
This is huge amount of downloads for this kind of project. I could never believe this kind of numbers few years ago. Back then we (developers) thought WinMerge as tool for programmers and system administrators. That was a good excuse to left things (especially the GUI) unfinished – only professionals would be using the WinMerge and they are used to that kind of things…
Indeed many problems in WinMerge originate from those days – we didn’t think and plan enough. If something felt useful addition, we added it. So what if it was hackish or hard to use – few users (as we thought) could cope with it. That is why we have this weird and hard to modify format to define file filters among other things.
Later we realized that we must start thinking about users too. And I think this was the hardest argument among me and some other developers. They just kept repeating WinMerge being developer tool and we don’t need to care about “casual” users. As for them it was extra work to make WinMerge easier for users. It went to the point I was ready to left the project if the attitude won’t change. Luckily (?) it didn’t go that far.
Basically after that I’ve been the lead developer of the project. And my focus has been to make WinMerge more user friendly. GUI changes have been big – 2.4.0 was the first “good” WinMerge release and 2.6.x made WinMerge really popular. As much as I personally like to 2.10 release, there is still a lot to do for improving WinMerge.
As I wrote to the new WinMerge developers-forum I still want next stable release to improve existing features than adding new features. We still need to improve those things we implemented poorly years back.
