fingerfans.dreamhosters.com

I sometimes wonder how many people are left who regularly use Fingerworks products. I try to check in here every few months (sometimes longer), but there's only a few posts a year at most. Having the forum broken out into sections seems a little silly when most haven't been posted to in years. Is it time to re-examine the best way to get support and community to help each other with these things? I'm old-fashioned and would be happy with an e-mail mailing list (as then I wouldn't have to remember to check a forum page every so often), but I also wonder how much is left to be said if I'm the only one left that's still a regular user.

Is anybody else here? Is it worth still having something? Would something simpler (or more complicated?) than this forum make sense to use? How can we find the remaining users of this technology?

Hi Peter!
It seems that the FingerWorks users are slowly going extinct. There were never many of us in the first place. I must admit that I sold off my own devices a while ago, and I have barely visited this site since then, except for admin tasks. If you look at the memberlist, you'll see that 8 users (inluding you and me) visited the forum this year, and 18 users visited in the past 2 years. That is definitely not a large user base!

I see what you mean about a mailing list or some other system instead of this forum. If I were to launch something for the current userbase, it might not be a website and forum like this one. However, I wouldn't risk a change now because every change loses some users. Despite the low traffic, this site has been around for more than a decade and it can be easily found on search engines.

Did you know that you can subscribe to forum updates? Not just individual topics you'd like to follow, but on a whole forum section at once: go back from this thread to a subforum, then click the "subscribe forum" at the very bottom.

I don't have a magic trick up my sleeve, no silver bullet, or any ideas for gathering and engaging the remaining FingerWorks users. As bitter as it may sound, perhaps it's worth focusing on what we have, and appreciate the benefits the devices have brought us over the years - and accept that the best of times have passed. We could play the "what if Apple hadn't..." game all night long but it won't change the fact that they did. And we're making the best of it, making the best of what we have. Our devices, and our community!

Thanks for the pointer to the "subscribe forum" feature, I'll be sure to do that so I can find out when people post here.

And also thanks for giving me hope that the number of people left using these on a regular basis is still in at least the double digits. I was afraid I was close to the only one left.

petercooperjr wrote:How many of us are left? Does a forum still make sense?

Absolutely! Please keep this forum up and running. I have half a dozen iGesture Pads lying on my shelf, and not a single one has gone defective (i.e. I'm still using the first one I bought in 2005).

I would be absolutely amputated without my (heavily customized) iGesture Pad.

That's why I love this forum, even if there should be only a handful of us left. And the forum is still a valuable resource in the case of problems -- see my today's post in the iGesture Pad section.

Cheers
David