Your site, Bob's World's Best Freeware
(
http://webpages.charter.net/bobad/best)
provides a nice list of software obviously selected after a great deal
of thought. I have a few observations that I know would make your
site even more more useful to me and many other visitors.
First, include an explanation of each of your picks and its rating.
- Why did a program fall short of a 9 or 10?
- What feature(s) made it superior to similar programs?
For example, why did you rate avast! 7 instead of 9 or 10? Why did
you pick it over AntiVir and AVG?
You have gone to the trouble of rating each program rather than just
picking the best. Please give us the benefit of your effort. I for
one would want to know, for example, that a program is far superior to
anything else you've evaluated but is still only a 6 because none of
the programs addresses several important needs (or no single program
addresses all the needs).
Second, you wrote "A 9 rating is excellent. To rate a 10, the program
must be excellent, and I must personally use it." This needs further
clarification.
Does this mean that a program you use gets a 1 point bonus, or only if
it is already a 9? In either case, if a program does not receive a
bonus, is that because you have little need for it or you use
something else for the purpose? If the latter, what is/are the
shortcoming/s (e.g., not multiuser)? Are you just so used to another
program that it is not worth switching? Or you primarily use the
program at work and management/the customer provides/mandates
something else (or aren't willing to pay for the pick as required for
commercial use)?
Identifying the programs you personally use is a useful fact that I
would want included in the evaluation. For example the textual
evaluation of a program you use might conclude with "I use it
frequently/daily/whenenever I rip CDs/for my backups/...." Or perhaps
"I would use OpenOffice but my employer mandates Word documents and
converting complexly formatted documents back and forth every day is
impractical because conversion introduces slight format differences."
Another approach might be to annotate the rating with an asterisk to
indicate you use it and a plus to indicate that you use it and awarded
an extra point (if there is even so subtle a distinction).
Third, providing a higher level of grouping would help visitors find
your recommendations. For example I think of dictionary and thesaurus
as being closely related. If I found your dictionary choice and it
included a thesaurus (as Pardon does), I might not have noticed that
you consider WordWeb to be the best thesaurus. If you don't want to
group categories, the textual explanation also offers a place for a
few well placed crossreferences ("Also see Thesaurus").
Bob, thanks for posting your recommendations and especially for taking
the extra step of including your ratings. While all of us might
quibble with some of the specific selections and ratings (WordWeb a 10
as a thesaurus? NO WAY!), that is partially what makes the ratings
process fun. The answers are always somewhat idiosyncratic. Keep up
the good work.
)