Who do these guys think they are?

Dear Chris and Ashley,

Who do you guys think you are! You promise to help us manage our attention. You promise a beautiful, discrete and polished application that will tell us what we need to know - when we need to know (like my mum!).

What do you do instead? After months of waiting for your sorry arses you finally deliver a program that won't even run after I install it. Don't you test this crap? You are not helping me manage my attention - you're wasting my time.

'Alpha' is not a cover for 'crap'. And you sirs.. are crap.

You're ex alpha tester

Mr Unhappy

This was the kind of email and forum posts we were expecting when we released the first widely distributed version of Touchstone to hundreds of people last night only to have reports start pouring in that it was crashing on start-up!

In fact, that letter above was just made up by me. I couldn't use a real example because we didn't get any emails like that! They were all wonderfully understanding and sympathetic and most of all.. helpful! We got stack traces and event logs and screen captures and everything else we could hope for - even though you all have not even seen our app - you still gave us your attention and pitched in to help.

For that - we are very, very grateful.

We have spent today trying to diagnose the problem... but we are coming across a little glitch - how do you fix a problem that doesn't seem to present itself?

Last night I couldn't even run Touchstone, and now it runs without a glitch. What did I change? Nothing! The bug just went away. It's as if it never happened. Which is exactly why we released it - it wasn't happening to us until we announced it!

So is this a load/scale issue? It's not quite clear. The only way to test that for sure is to spam everyone some more and see if it happens again. Something I am hesitant to do - I don't want to disturb everyone again if the build turns out to be faulty again.

We have made a number of pieces more fault tolerant and asked the people engaged on our forums to provide some additional feedback.

Once we go through that - we will tentatively try to announce a patch.

Thank you all once again for your patience and lets hope our second attempt is less.. lame!

*Goes back to work*