Ideas wanted

Python.org and friends, Hello. My name is David Jansen and I work for a small company that puts out a small shareware text editor called EmEditor. EmEditor started out as a Japanese text editor and is now offered in half a dozen languages. I've been a big fan of various open source projects, especially PHP and Python, and recently I got to thinking about how I might direct the development of our editor down a path that benefits some in these communities. I was hoping someone at php.net or someone referred by php.net could offer some suggestions. Let me explain what I'd like to do and have happen and then you can decide if there's some way to get the ball rolling or if I should just scrap the whole durn thing. Since EmEditor is more than capable of replacing Notepad and competing with other editors out there, we've moved on to trying to make it a prime environment for developers to do their thing. We've added all the usual tools plus a few new ones for over a dozen languages and we've gotten a very good reception so far from various communities inside Japan and out. But now that we have an editor in which many things can be done, we'd like to focus on making it really useful and streamlined for a handful of communities/languages and really try to make it a kickass editor for those groups instead of trying to be something to everybody. Of course, I'd like to focus on supporting the open source projects I'm interested in but my voice has to compete with EmEditor-using communties that can shout me down. The main developer and the owner of our company responds to user feedback religiously so whichever community/communities he hears back from the most is the community/communities he usually develops for. Inside and outside of Japan we hear from the C/C++, Visual Basic, Java, etc. communities. In Japan, Ruby has a big following and our Japanese-language version is affected by their voice but outside of Japan we don't get the feedback from other communities that I need to sway our direction. I need help! My point and plea is... I need some help from the php community in the form of active feedback and suggestions about our little text editor in order to offer this same community another option in which to do their thing. We have a kickass editor and there are other kickass editors out there in which to develop Python and php but it doesn't hurt to expand the field of choices. The problem is, if I come straight out and ask everyone on comp.lang.python or the php mailing list to try out EmEditor and if they like it, actively let the company know what they like and what they don't and where they'd like to see us take it blah blah blah, if I do that, it might just come off sounding like I'm spamming the list and that wouldn't help any. But if I don't do something, the communities I would like to develop for misses out and I miss out on the opportunity to do something I really want to do... How do I get the word out that a bunch of interested Pythoneers and Phpers could have the development of a cool little editor at their disposal if they just make themselves heard? Feel free to pass the above along to anyone who might be able to offer a suggestion or two or three. Thanks, David Jansen -------------- David Jansen Software Design Engineer Emurasoft, Inc. http://www.emurasoft.com/ E-mail: david@emurasoft.com