As this is the first time I blog, a short introduction might be in order. My name is Bartek Tatkowski and I work as a developer at Tobii in Stockholm, Sweden. I’ve been working at Tobii for roughly 18 months now, mainly with the development of MyTobii but I’ve also done an 8 month long guest appearance at Tobii’s US office where I worked with support.

Working with support turned out to be an rewarding learning experience, especially for someone working in development. We developers often get a little stuck in our own world and our only means of interaction with the users come from going to trade shows and getting bug reports from our support department. Working in support allowed me to interact with users on a daily basis and take in a lot of feedback from users, both praise and constructive criticism. I’ve taken all this feedback with me when I returned to development and set out to improve MyTobii accordingly. One of these improvements that you’ll notice in the new 2.4 release is the new license dialog.

Licensing is a necessary evil in software development. The reason we chose to use license keys is to provide users with the possibility to easily choose which applications they want bundled with their MyTobii device. Without getting to technical, your MyTobii installation comes bundled with all applications, but they won’t appear on your desktop until you provide the proper license key.

A lot of people commented that the old licensing dialog was confusing – they weren’t sure where to enter the license keys or how to activate them once they entered them. In MyTobii 2.4, this dialog has been redesigned and simplified to make life easier for our customers and resellers. The redesign took all of maybe three hours, but we never would’ve discovered it if it wasn’t for user feedback. To see what else is new in the 2.4 release, check out Markus Cederlunds post here in the blog section.

The point I’m trying to make is that all user feedback we receive is incredibly valuable to us. In the past we haven’t had a good way of collecting this feedback, but this will hopefully change with the introduction of the MyTobii Community. I’m looking forward to reading your feedback and ideas, both on MyTobii and on the Community. An excellent medium for this is the MyTobii Community forums.

Make your opinion heard!