Mint Review
The Mint is out! Yey! Fighting hard not to give it a special treatment (I’m neither paid for writing this, nor am I Shaun Inman’s buddy), let’s start with a tour.
The promo site
The promo site is very nice – Inman’s style is well recognized. Fancy large headlines and buttons, trendy details… and Buy now button? Ouch… Somehow, I had a feeling that Mint will be freeware, or at least shareware. Oh, well – thirty bucks is a fair price for such piece of software, let’s then see what’s offered.
Watch out! Slippery!
Opening demo page… oops! Somewhat inconvenient notification:
The demo has been temporarily disabled. While Mint can easily handle recording hundreds—if not thousands—of hits a minute, it is not optimized to display data at that rate. Please check back once some of the initial interest has died down.
Okay, he didn’t expect this (or did, but had no backup plan). Downloading 7 megs movie took a moment for me, but I don’t know what a visitor with a slower connection would say about that. But then again – if the A-list guys love it, it’s probably cool.
Interface
Demo movie shows the main advantage of the Mint and – like with the Blinksale – it’s mostly about the interface. It’s obviously a trend of adding cosmetics to already existing functionality in a way Apple sells its’ products – proven solutions in an attractive package. User experience is definitely what’s hot this season, baby.
(Ed: At the time of this writing I haven’t laid my hands on it, take the interface evaluation with a reserve.)
No Firefox and Safari – no Mint for you
So, let’s take look at the requirements. Ooh! Compatibility test! Hot! Like that. But wait. Whatta?
In order to view Mint you should be using a modern browser with support for transparent PNGs, modern DOM scripting (including XMLHTTPRequest) with competency in CSS 2. Safari or Firefox, both free, are highly recommended. Internet Explorer PC support is planned but not an immediate priority. IE Mac will not be supported.
Ouch! I mean ouch! Paying for something that works in approx. 30% (and I’m being generous with the numbers) browsers? The application is probably great and all, but I fell that that was just a little bit too ambitious decision.
No JavaScript – no records
In order to record hits Mint requires JavaScript be enabled. This may be an issue for some but was a necessary trade-off that prevents Mint’s results from being skewed by non-human spiders, crawlers and referrer-spam bots.
I’m not very happy with this neither. The stats system should record all traffic and filter junk out. This way, the numbers are not accurate, which is not something I’d expect from something I’m willing to pay for. Also, making decisions for me is not something that I like very much if I’m the one with the money.
Gimme, gimme, gimme!
After reading all materials at the promo page, I went to purchase. For me, paying for a software is not a big deal, especially if I can learn a lot about how it’s done and develop it to suit my needs (there’s plug-in API called Peper, which was a great move).
A cold shower once again – payments are made through PayPal, which means I’m not able to purchase it. And I really wished it.
Maybe if someone who reads this, is a good friend of Shaun? If you are, could you please ask the Wolf to send me application on a CD and I’d cash-on-delivery since I live in a country not good enough for PayPal.
Summary
In short – if I’m not web developer interested in how it’s done, I couldn’t care less, since there’s plenty of similar (and sometimes more accurate) free tools which I can still log into from an internet caffee with plain old IE (which I do when I’m out of town). JavaScript as a requirement on the visitor’s side is just one more reason for a second thoughts. Needless discrimination, considering the hype, the popularity of the ShortStat and the Shaun Inman’s tallent.
Update
Wait a minute! $30 is a fair price for a license, but per site? Slightly modified sentence from Jason Kottke: If one is good at everything else as she is at making a successful business plans she’s in trouble.
15 Comments
Hell yes, that’s a good one… I already asked “What for?” - There are tons of free tools, why get this one? And after reading your statement a have to say, nope… maybe if i would only create site in my freetime i would purchase it, but for business application, no way…
The funniest thing: The community swears to use firefox, use css, not to use javascript etc… ;)
Cool, i don’t need to mint me up, i feel fresh anyway :)
Comment (#) by Whizzler — 6th September 2005.
This is a niche tool. It’s not meant for the hundreds of thousand of beginners authoring their pages in Microsoft Word or Frontpage. Those people wouldn’t pay 30 USD in any case.
This tool is meant for the people who read SI’s site, and those of other web standards enthusiasts (back when web standards were a big deal).
Choosing to target only knowledgeable people is a risk, but SI decided to take it, so he can focus on what he likes.
Re: browsers, I imagine IE7 will be supported, when released. Re: JavaScript, it’s needed to determine the screen size, color depth and other such statistics that we love.
All in all, this is a tool meant for a specific community, which appreciates these kind of apps, and not for everyone.
Comment (#) by Gabriel Mihalache — 6th September 2005.
Re: Whizzler … JavaScript “is bad” when used recklessly, instead of content or presentation. In this case, JavaScript is the right way to go, and anyone from the web standards community will tell you.
Comment (#) by Gabriel Mihalache — 6th September 2005.
Gabriel, I understand what you are saying, but when it comes to this kind of utilities, for me, the functionality is in the first place. The cool options factor should be a bonus, not the main product’s feature.
Comment (#) by marko — 6th September 2005.
Most 3rd party site tracking tools utilize Javascript for the recording of user data. Without it, most of the stats would just not be there.
Take the fact that 95-98% of your traffic does in fact have Javascript enabled, I don’t see what the big deal is.
At my last place of work, we used Omniture for site tracking. It was the bomb and cost a lot of money (recurring), but it was well worth it to the entire company. Mint is a play toy when compared to something like Omniture, but for $30 I think it’s well worth it.
Comment (#) by Justin Perkins — 6th September 2005.
Seems too hyped, I’m not touching it until I can see more than that little demo video… which really didn’t show me much.
Besides – when this is $30 per site license (too much indeed), but then a very interactive tool such as http://www.slideshowpro.net/ for flash is $20, I start feeling ripped off. I barely pay that much for my shareware mac apps…
Comment (#) by Brady J. Frey — 6th September 2005.
Good (or, uhm, larger) tracking systems do not rely on JavaScript alone. I need to agree that $30 is indeed a fair price, as far as I can judge the features and usability of Mint. In comparison to Webalizer, for example, Mint seems to be much easier to use.
Comment (#) by Jens Meiert — 7th September 2005.
If only I could purchase, I could analize the interface better. Unfotunately, I still haven’t had a chance to try it out.
Comment (#) by marko — 7th September 2005.
Marko, here you can take a look at it.
Comment (#) by Sebastian Schmieg — 7th September 2005.
Sebastian, thanks for the link. I’ll give it a try soon.
Comment (#) by marko — 7th September 2005.
Ha! Shaun is the Chuck Anderson of CSS and whatnot :)
Comment (#) by duke — 9th September 2005.
I’ve had an opportunity to check out mint on my employer’s website, but haven’t plopped down the $30 for a license for jasongraphix.com yet. I have no problem with the price, I’m just not sure if it’s something I really need…yet.
Comment (#) by Jason Beaird — 10th September 2005.
Just thought I would let you know, I love the design, beautiful layout, keep up the good work!
Comment (#) by Victor Johnson — 13th September 2005.
I filled out a long reply, which took forever, as this live preview thing caused my typing to go to about 1 letter a second, hit PUBLISH, only to be told that I didn’t fill out all the required fields, only to hit my back button and see my text has been cleared.
You might want to fix that.
Anyways, here’s the short version of my lost post:
- 3rd party stats packages that require javascript don’t give you a complete picture and slow down your site
- most current log analysis tools have a horrendous interface, so this will likely find a nice niche market just due to a better user experience.
Comment (#) by Darrel — 19th September 2005.
What’s the point of tool that can display search engine spidering stats? There no point, actually. That tool is just hype, nohting really new, just plain hype of few people feeling too high on web standards.
30$ for one site? What’s the big deal? I can get much more intesive stats incl. search engines and spiders and whatever robots for few dollars a month.
Comment (#) by dusoft — 28th September 2005.
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