Category: News

“By the time (the Leaning Tower of Pisa) was 10% built, everyone knew it would be a total disaster. But the investment was so big they felt compelled to go on. Since its completion, it cost a fortune to maintain and is still in danger of collapsing. There are no plans to replace it, since it was never needed in the first place. I expect every installation has its own pet software which is analogous to the above.” – Guy Kawasaki

I know exactly how this feels.

Another quote recently came from another company which is building services based on Google Calendar and described it as trying to build a house during an earthquake.

Working with Apple’s SyncServices is similar. The only showstopper bugs we came across were related to “just the way SyncServices does things”. It randomly resets, wiping out your calendar data or your address book data or resetting your .Mac sync and the best Apple can offer is “Restore from your backup.”

And just for you snarky types, this happens on machines NOT running SyncBridge.

As a result of that, and also because of Leopard and “Calendar Server”, we’re redoing a lot of SyncBridge to try and make up for shortcomings in SyncServices. It’s delayed because of some contract work which came in as a bit of a surprise but Phil, our lead coder, will be at the Big Nerd Ranch in Germany next week.

And yes, there’s other products on the horizon….

We’re preventing new registrations for the time being as we implement some changes.

We’re not happy with the performance of Ruby with our database queries even on the new server and so we’re going to be doing some extensive back-end changes.

We’ve also extended our free registrations until the end of December 2006 while we work on things.

SyncBridge has been out for 10 hours. We have 52 users from 9 different countries sharing 84 calendars. Now, that’s the power of the internet! We got listed on MacUpdate, Versiontracker and we’re preparing the PRs for other sites in the Mac web today. Today is one of my best days ever. It’s just really fulfilling to see people using this app and then giving us such good feedback.

UPDATE: SyncBridge has been out for 17 hours. We have 95 users from 9 different countries sharing 145 calendars.

James at EirePreneur is running a series of in-depth intreviews with Irish startups which he’s dubbing EirePreneurZ. The first was with Karen Jackson of Gardini which is a Dublin based company founded to provide Gardens for Balconies, Patios, Yards, Terraces and Roof Tops and planters for House fronts and Windows.

Next up, he has a great interview with us on the same site. I must say, we’re quite funny. I think it’s a good sign that the second interview in the EirePreneurZ series comes from North of the Virtual Border.

PJ, enjoying the success of no longer being a starving hopeful artist, has started vidcasting (which is a name I’ve invented now because vlog sounds silly and vee-casting sounds worse).

I especially love the intro where he says “Oh, hello…”

Reminds me of Jackanory which is decidedly old hat now and probably superceded by CBeebies Storytellers.

Like it’s a surprise that the camera is switched on? That’s years of drama training there 🙂

Anyway, I’m going to be watching regularly, same bat-time, same bat-place….

Yeah, you heard me. It’s complete.

We’ve just got some infrastructure stuff to do now. Get a digital certificate (GoDaddy are pissing about and handing me from support team to support team) sorted and get a new fast server sorted (again, we have one but the host, DedicatedNOW, started asking for all sort of pissy information which amount to an identity theft starter kit. I swear, if it had been possible to email organic material, they’d have asked for some. And this was AFTER they’d charged my card!).

At the end of the day, if you charge IN ADVANCE for a service that NEVER LEAVES YOUR DATACENTRE and YOU HAVE MY MONEY, why do you need a copy of photographic ID with a signature and copies of the front and back of my credit card?

Anyway. We’ll be moving to our new server homes in the next couple of days while Aidan is taking some well-deserved time off. It’s a common holiday period in Northern Ireland due the fifth season (Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Marching). They’re calling it OrangeFest this year which is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Are they going to rebrand St Pat’s Day as “GreenFest”?

It’s been over a week now since Aidan fixed the last bug and the only issue we have had is with some bugs in SyncServices – code that we don’t have access to. Aidan has filed a bug report and it’s apparently a duplicate so there’s not a lot we can do there. It’s not a showstopper but it makes me wish Apple were a little more transparent with this sort of things with their paid-up developers if not all their ADC partners.

We’re opening the doors for the first public beta. I have a list of people, Aidan has a list of people and it’ll feel weird giving access to this cool piece of software to people we don’t know personally. Not long now.

Last couple of days we’ve been running SyncBridge in a production environment and adding some last minute features, future proofing, feedback about APIs and turning off debug messages. It’s been error free for a while which is so nice. It’s not a bad feeling when people using the app in production manage to find some bugs that you never even considered could occur.

We also have new icons. They’re simple, iconic, abstract and suitable for an app that you might run once or twice.

“Once or twice?” I hear you say?

Yes, once or twice. The beauty of SyncBridge is that it ties into the system so well that when you make changes in iCal, these are automatically communicated to SyncBridge and, if you have a net connection, these are then sent to the server automagically.

Anyway, I’ll finish up with some of the best feedback I’ve ever seen.