Always developing
I’ve just updated my site, there’s about ten pictures in rotation in the header, some are variations on each other (a few close-ups). Let me know what you think, are there any that you like?
All but three were taken in a rather far distant country, bet you can’t guess which ones, and which country.
Thanks to my friend Gordon for pointing out the site that told me how to crop my photos correctly and set up the rotator script.
How I explained REST to my wife…
Smart cookie putting it simply…
Just got back from seeing Jack Dee at the Edinburgh Play House, it was superb, a great night out.
I drove into Edinburgh directly from work and met up with Mandy at a Tapas restaurant that we’ve enjoyed eating at before. The meal actually wasn’t that great this time, but the company was fantastic (I have to say that, she’s my wife)! We then went for a drink in a nearby pub followed by a wander for a couple more metres down the road to the theatre for a thoroughly good laugh, Mandy was even in tears of laughter a number of times! Jack was much better than I expected, I kind of expected it to be a bit of a rip-off, barely an hour of observational humour and tired old jokes already seen on the TV. But no, it was two hours of very funny commentary on life, funny situations and the occasional groan of revulsion at something disgusting (but very funny), and lasted well over two hours (with an interval to catch your breath).
If Jack’s coming to a venue near you, go see him, you won’t be disapointed.
Having linked to DrunkenBlog’s interview with Brent and Sheila Simmons last night, I’ve just downloaded MarsEdit and given it a whirl. Wow, I love desktop applications, what a difference it makes to be able to post to my blog without going to my website.
This is why I think CaseDetective for FogBugz will be useful for a number of people, desktop apps just have so much of a nicer feel to them, you can do so much more, and quicker too. For example, I’ve got spell checking as I write this, no more copying to Word (yes I use MS Word on my Mac, so what of it?) just to check my atrocious spelling.
So, what’s CaseDetecive I hear you ask? CaseDetective for FogBugz is the application I’m working on, a desktop companion to FogBugz by Fog Creek.
My intentions are that CaseDetecive allow me (and anyone else who may be interested) to extract data from FogBugz and generally dig a little deeper than you can with the current release (4.0). I want to be able to extract to Excel or similar apps various fields that meet various criteria (filters), and I think there are quite a few others who would like to be able to do the same too.
I’ve got a lot of ideas for what I want CaseDetective to allow me to do beyond just extracting data, but I’ll talk about that a little further down the line. If anyone reading this is a FogBugz user, and has any ideas on what they would like to be able to do from a desktop companion app, please add a comment to this post. All suggestions are very welcome!
This excellent interview on DrunkenBlog with Brent and Sheila Simmons, a.k.a Ranchero Software, the makers of NetNewsWire, MarsEdit and other great software for the Mac, is a really nice insight into the life of a successful independent software vendor.
A definite recommended read.
microISV.com has pointed out indirectly that Annalee Newitz has written a very interesting white paper as a “A User’s Guide to EULAs”, with Donna Wentworth commenting on some excerpts. If you have ever scanned through a End User License Agreement (who actually ever reads them properly) and just clicked “Accept” to get past that load of legalese without a second thought, you might like to reconsider this approach in the future. There’s some really scary stuff in some of the examples, in some cases you can’t even share your opinions about a product publicly once you’ve accepted the license. In the case of a Beta program you can be quite happy about this, it’s understandable that the company doesn’t want their unreleased software talked about, but this is fully released software we’re talking about.
Number 6 on the list of nasty clauses is the ubiquitous “We are not responsible if this product messes up your computer.”, and this is basically the only clause that I’ve thought about including in my EULA. Here’s what my EULA was going to be before reading these two posts:
Terms Of Sale And License
*IMPORTANT* Please read the below carefully *IMPORTANT*IMiJ Ltd grants one person per user license purchased the use of this software on one or more personal computers.
Every effort has been made to make this a quality and feature rich application for you to enjoy. However, you install and use this software at your own risk and indemnify IMiJ Ltd against any claims should installation or usage of this software result in loss or damage of any kind. If you do not accept the terms of this license please do not install or use this software.
This software is covered by a 90 day no questions asked money back guarantee. If you wish to surrender your license, please contact IMiJ Ltd at customer-service@imij.co.uk with details of your order number and serial number and we will refund your money and disable the serial number as soon as possible.
What do you think, is this a fair license? I tried to make it as simple as possible, clear and to the point, but after reading the linked articles, I might end up saying something like this:
Terms Of Sale And License
*IMPORTANT* Please read the below carefully *IMPORTANT*IMiJ Ltd grants one person per user license purchased the use of this software on one or more personal computers.
Every effort has been made to make this a quality and feature rich application for you to enjoy, if it does something that you didn’t expect or don’t want, please don’t take me to court! Be excellent to one and other!
This software is covered by a 90 day no questions asked money back guarantee. If you wish to surrender your license, please contact IMiJ Ltd at customer-service@imij.co.uk with details of your order number and serial number and we will refund your money and disable the serial number as soon as possible.
What do you think, an improvement?
Well, just upgraded to WordPress 1.5, and decided not carry my 1.2 “theme” across for the initial upgrade, just to make sure it went smoothly. And smotthly it went, well, that’s assuming you can see this post!
Couldn’t have been simpler, backed up my database, loaded the backup into a spare database, and then followed the really simple instructions. Took less than ten minutes, and at least 7 of those were spent reading through the instructions and making sure I had a good backup. Dead easy.
Now it’ll just take me a couple of weeks to decide what to do for a new theme etc. 🙂
In a previous post I mentioned that I was wondering whether I should contact the vendor of the web app that I’m writing my Desktop app to work with, I was worried about whether they would like the idea or not, whether they would think I was just taking advantage of their hard work.
Yesterday I finally plucked up the courage to send an email to the vendor. They replied within about half an hour, when I saw the reply so quick I couldn’t help thinking it might be a pretty terse response. I shouldn’t have been so worried about their reaction. Although I won’t tell you what they said as I feel that is confidential, I think I can say that they were very encouraging about the idea, and offered to help me with any problems I might have!
I can’t tell you how much of a weight off my mind it is to know that the vendor is more than happy with me writing an app to work with theirs. I really should have known better, the guys at Fog Creek are great, always very helpful, and very pragmatic. Just what you’d expect from the company run by Joel Spolsky.
Yes, you read it right, I’ve let slip what I’m actually doing, don’t faint! 🙂 I’ve decided that I’ve really got no reason to keep secret what I’m developing, and as my good friend Gordon pointed out in his comment to my “The Big Think – Part 3” post, I may even get some feedback from the user community. And as I’ve said before, feedback is King.
Went to my first Edinburgh Linux User Group meeting on Thursday night, well worth going to.
I’ve been a bit of a lurker on the mailing list for while, and always meant to go to one of their meetings; it took a chance mail to the group from a fellow Informix user to spur me to go.
Not much more to say really, just that it was well worth the trip over the Edinburgh on the bus to have a few pints with some fellow Linux users, a nice relaxed evening, good to put a few faces to names. I’ll be going again.
I’ve been suffering from a spell of lost focus recently, just haven’t managed to get going on developing my app, and have been having some (continuing) problems in deciding on the app’s initial feature set.
This is probably one of the most common reasons in delaying and possibly even killing a new product, because if you don’t know what the product is trying to achieve, and for whom, you lose focus and start developing features that may be irrelevant and really have no product as you have not properly identified the market.
With Christmas and a faulty video card on my development box introducing some time away from development for the best part of the last month, I’ve had some time to re-think my product’s focus, who I am making the product for and what features they are going to want. However, what I’ve really come to believe over this little hiatus is that I’m wasting way too much time thinking about extended features, when in reality until people start using my software and giving me feedback I don’t really know what the customer wants, I can only think I know, even if I am a customer myself. I’ve said all this before, but this time I’m being ruthless in applying these principles.
So, I’m chucking a lot of my ideas for the future out the window, and am going to concentrate on the few features that I want now, and think others also want now (deduced from posts to forums etc). At the moment I’m the only customer I can talk to, so I’m going to satisfy my needs first, and wait for feedback before spending time on any further features.
As part of this re-focus I’ve designed a much better user interface, having some time away from the project and in particular using a few apps that I really enjoy using has made me realise that I was going down the wrong route, I was complicating the interface when I could really do a lot better with only a handful of controls. I was going to be using tabs to separate different views of the data (remember, this is primarily a reporting/data view tool), but this was a bit clunky and meant the user would need to use at least two clicks to change their view of the data, with a lot of eye movement in hunting down items to select in a newly visible tab. There are better ways to do this, there might be a slight increase in clutter in a particular control but subtle use of colour and visual separators can help the user quickly find the area they are looking for.
Anyway, tonight I’ll be back on the development box and ripping the app apart, I think I have a fair bit of work to do now, but less than I would have if I hadn’t re-focused my view of the apps future, I’ve got my confidence back and am seriously excited about getting down and dirty with the code again.