ianmjones

Quick tip for taking screen shots…

Have folder (mine’s called “Blank”) on your desktop.

Open said folder and maximize/strech it to cover your entire desktop, making sure it’s background is pure white.

Open application and take screen shots with plenty of the white folder background surrounding the window being captured.

If you’re taking screen shots of modal dialogs or sheet windows (Mac OS X) then before opening the dialog window make sure the main window is either moved out of the way or made small enough to be hidden by the new window.

This will give you a nice clean screen shot without any clutter from other windows on the edges.

Alternatively, just set your desktop background to white and hide the desktop icons (can be done on both Windows and Mac with a couple of clicks).

I prefer the first way as all I have to do is open up the blank folder and switch back to my app, but if you’re constrained for space (i.e. using 800×600) then the desktop method works well.

You can see this in action on my screen shots page for CaseDetective for FogBugz. The Mac OS X shots are taken with a blank folder for background, the Windows ones are taken with a white desktop and hidden desktop icons.

Update (2006-02-19): This post was inspired by a question across on the Business Of Software forums.

One response was to use Alt+Print Screen to capture just the window. Here’s my response to that…

The problem with Alt+Print Screen is that it still captures a rectangular area, so if you have rounded corners to your window (Windows XP) then you’ll get some of the background show through.

Using a white (or whatever colour you need) folder background fixes that quickly without having to get your paint brush out!

Cheap, simple and effective.

And if you were to use something like SnapX Pro on the Mac to take a screen shot of a Windows app in Virtual PC then you’d need to select a screen area rather than window.

Also, I’ve found that by using a fixed screen area for my screen captures I can get a consistent image size for both my Windows and Mac screen shots simply by re-sizing my windows to fit. This helps a lot as you’ll not have any problems in fitting those images into a neat grid, which always looks much nicer (in my opinion anyway). You’ll also get much crisper window edges if you take a screen area rather than single window, at least that’s what I’ve found anyway.

A while back I wrote about my development setup, a part of which is of course Source Code Management (SCM).

At that time I was using Perforce, which I was more than happy with, it sure is a great system, fast, efficient and very stable. I had no real problems with it at that time.

However, at the beginning of the year I moved to Subversion.

There are two main reasons for this:

1) Just like Cade I felt the cost of buying a license prohibitive.

If I should need to step up from the free 2 users/workspaces version I would need to outlay $800, which is way out of my league just now. And because I’ve been hopping between my Desktop and Laptop I’ve been very aware that I don’t have any slack there, I couldn’t for example do a secondary checkout of a back version without dropping one of my users or over-writing my current workspace. The 2 workspaces/users limit is too strict when you want to do anything except straight-line development (a second computer is at least a second workspace, even if copied from the first computer).

Subversion is free.

2) I want to be able to submit versions while on the road (i.e. at REAL World 2006) or from either my desktop or laptop.

This means I need to run my SCM on my laptop, as I can’t be sure I’m going to have a solid connection to a remote server while on the road.

I also use “Portable Home Directories” to sync my home directories between my desktop and laptop, this means I might be half-way through some development when I sync between the two and then carry on development on the second computer. With Perforce this is impossible to do, as Perforce recognizes different computers as being different workspaces (or users, never quite worked it out), and gets in a bit of a tizzy when you try and check in stuff from a different computer than which you checked it out on.

For Subversion I’ve downloaded Martin Ott’s (co-founder of TheCodingMonkeys) compiled version 1.3.0 which includes the more stable fsfs rather than bdb back-end.

I’m now running svnserve locally on my computers as me, with the repository sitting in my home directory. This means I can check in any time I like on either machine as Subversion doesn’t lock on check-out by default. And because of the sync going via my server I have a backup there (onto an external hard-disk), along with scheduled backups to my .Mac iDisk and another networked external hard-disk. This means my repository is sitting in at least 5 separate places (not counting backups to CD/DVD)!

All in all I’m much happier now that I have Subversion, it’s moved on a lot since I last looked at it, it seems very stable and I’m finding it a lot quicker to use now that I’m back to the command line too. I did enjoy using a GUI with Perforce, and I’ve looked at some of the offerings available for Subversion, but in the end I’ve found the command line more than adequate.

Cade A. Fasset has started to write The ISV Diaries, his life as a 1-man software startup.

This promises to be a great blog to follow as Cade builds his development infrastructure, product, website and finally starts to market and support his creation.

So far Cade has briefly described what he’s up to, SCM Woes, how he came to pick FogBugz for his bug tracking system (good decision!), and the fun he’s had in trying to host FogBugz remotely on Windows and now Linux.

I picked up on this blog from a very nice feature request he posted to the FogBugz discussion forums. His idea is that customers should be sent a second automated response if no manual reply has been sent within a set time period, e.g. 24 hours, which he thought was a great idea when he received a similar email from his hosting provider apologizing for not being able to respond within their normal 24 hours. Great idea, I hope Fog Creek are able to implement this in a future release of FogBugz.

Good luck Cade, looking forward to following along on your journey.

Michael H. Pryor (co-founder of Fog Creek) has just announced a new website, the FogBugz Weblog.

This is great news, I’ve always wanted Michael to have a blog, I’m confident he’s got lots to share with us, and I’ve often thought it would be a good idea to have a FogBugz specific weblog myself, but Michael has trumped this by creating the FogBugz weblog.

And what’s even nicer and totally unexpected is that in his introductory post Michael says “Future posts will be about CaseDetective, translating FogBugz, a Gmail like notifier for new FogBugz cases, a proxy for Vault to make it think it is talking to its own built in tracker, and more ideas that I haven”.

That’s very nice of him, thanks Michael!

Update: It seems people are missing the fact that there is a RSS feed at http://blog.fogbugz.com/rss.xml
Probably because the FogBugz Weblog isn’t properly exposing it, but it is there and does work.

A day or so ago I got an email from Seth Godin which was sent to all Squidoo Lens Masters that had a lens in the top 100 to say that the ranking mechanism was about to change.

Originally Lenses were ranked by total visits since they were created, it was now going to be based on a rolling previous two weeks worth instead. So my RapidWeaver Lens which has been around since the beta days was likely to drop from the top 100, or so I thought.

Well, I’ve just looked at the “Top 100 Most Visited (traffic)” stats and this is what I’ve found:

As you can see, I’ve jumped from position 97 to position 20! Woohoo!

Now, you might be wondering why I have a RapidWeaver lens anyway, what’s that got to do with my current business, selling a desktop reporting tool for FogBugz called CaseDetective?

Apart from being a very happy RapidWeaver user and wanting to support a fellow U.K. based software developer, I’ll let you into a little secret… I had seriously thought about writing some RapidWeaver plugins. Having a RapidWeaver Lens would therefore have been a very good move, allowing me to gain an element of “master-hood” on the subject of RapidWeaver.

I say “had” because I’ve since decided not to take that path, writing plugins for someone else’s software isn’t the way I currently want to go with my business, I already have one “add-on” product in CaseDetective for FogBugz. I’d also have to spend considerable time learning Objective-C and Cocoa when I’m still enjoying discovering the power and new features of the forever evolving REALbasic language on a daily basis.

I must admit that the RapidWeaver plugin ideas I had were pretty darn good, and each was one that I could use myself, so there’s still a chance that I’ll build one or more of them in the future if no-one else does, but I have since come up with plenty of product ideas which I’ll most likely explore before.

All the ideas I have for new products are independent, i.e. they do not need any other software (other than basic OS services), which means they have their own market and are not constrained by the size of another product’s user base. I think this lack of independence in CaseDetective for FogBugz is it’s Achilles Heal, it means CaseDetective is forever tied to the fortunes of FogBugz, or any other bug tracking system that I might port it to. I’m also going to be forever playing catch-up with Fog Creek as they improve FogBugz and add features. I don’t want to be in that position with more than one product, one is enough.

Another benefit of the product ideas I have is that they are all able to be developed in REALbasic, and are largely database based and easily cross-platform, which plays on my strengths and interests.

The only problem, I’m so busy with CaseDetective I don’t have time to develop these ideas anyway! Which further backs up my decision not to create RapidWeaver plugins, I simply don’t have the time to learn the technology just now, even with Aaron Hillegass’s Cocoa: Programming For Mac OS X by my side.

I’m looking forward to a time when I’ll be able to develop some new products and hopefully improve my revenue streams, but at present there is so much I want to add to CaseDetective that I feel it might be some time before I’m able to get anything else to market.

Talking of which, I’d better get back to development, bye for now!

Joe Indie has just made a great post to his blog about the ups and downs of riding the Google AdWords roller coaster, how pulling back on his spending has had a delayed effect on his sales, and how he needs to find other methods of attracting the right traffic.

I’ve only recently started using Google AdWords for CaseDetective for FogBugz, but I’ve seen a steady increase in traffic to casedetective.com because of it, even though I’m keeping my bids very low at the moment. It’s a very interesting area that I’ll be coming back to soon.

Glenn Rice has decided that he too would like to have a micro adventure, so is starting his own MicroISV.

I have no idea what he’s up to just yet (not sure he knows yet either, or maybe he’s just playing his cards very close to his chest), but it sounds like he’s interested in doing something which may be sold as a software service rather than a straight download and buy.

It’ll be interesting to see how he goes with this, it’s always been touted as a great way to keep revenue flowing, but to my mind it only suits business orientated applications/services.

For example, both FogBugz and HelpSpot have an initial license fee which covers upgrades and support for a period of time, then there is a much reduced fee for continuing free upgrades and support cover. This gives a business peace of mind that they’re going to get a one-off annual charge that they can budget for and know they will always be able to pick up the phone to get support as and when they need it.

If however you tried to apply that model to a consumer orientated product you might struggle, consumers are much more near-sighted when it comes to buying software, they need what they need now and don’t want to continue spending money for something that already works for them. To some extent this can be extended to desktop software verses server, it’s not often you’ll see any kind of desktop software being sold as a service without a lot of back-chat from the users, whereas for most server software having the prospects of continuous upgrades is always desired.

When it comes to web services however, it’s a totally different ball of fish. If you’re not downloading a piece of software and everything is online, then it’s obvious to anyone, business or consumer, that the simplest way to pay is by the month or whatever period the customer feels comfortable with. As the customer has much less control over the updates to the software as it’s updated on the server and that’s it, customers are much more comfortable with being able to say to hell with it, it doesn’t work for me anymore so I’m not going to subscribe for another month.

That’s why paying for a year’s worth of a web service in advance doesn’t usually happen at first, most will pay for a month or two and if they really like it then plump down the wonga for a full year if the discount is attractive enough.

For me CaseDetective was always going to be a “download and buy” even though it’s primarily a business product. I guess the main reason being that it’s desktop software, and as I mentioned above I and many others just aren’t comfortable with paying an on-going fee for desktop software, try and buy suits most people just fine.

Anyway, this wasn’t supposed to be an analysis of payment methods, good luck Glenn, in whatever it is you’re looking to do!

Last week Dimitris Giannitsaros of RapidSgnal released MagnaCRM 1.0 unto the World, and I clean forgot to congratulate him, not even by email. I can only hang my head in shame and beg forgiveness, especially as he’s always been one of the first to send me notes of support and congratulations in the past.

Congratulations Dimitris, I know it must be a huge weight off of your shoulders to have finally released MagnaCRM, good luck, I hope you do very well with it.

But, your work has only really now begun, as people start to use your product you’ll get lots of great feedback, bug reports (no matter how good your QA is, there’s always something), feature requests and questions. It’s a great place to be, I know I’m enjoying myself, I’m sure you will to.

Well done, looking forward to seeing how things progress for you.