ɔimoɈɒ – Page 233 – Just another WordPress site

On the cusp, what next?

When I was writing RPGs, it was my opinion that we should always have one book “in production”, one about to “launch”, one “in research” and one “winding down” in sales. This, I thought, would ensure that we always had plenty to work on while, at the same time, making sure there was enough money coming into cover costs. As it happened some of the books sold really well, some sold poorly and some sold like hot cakes (in chronological order) and I could have made it a career, if I’d wanted. It didn’t work out that way but it was my first taste of sales, resource planning, production and demand. It was also my first taste of “Real Artists Ship” which is something that I’ll always remember.

Last night in the wee small hours, we debated the release schedule and also the finished products we would release. I’d like to take a moment to ask you, the reader, what you think we should finish first. These are still just “codenames” so bear with us.

SyncBridge
SyncBridge GE
SyncBridge 30

Enticing?

Technorati Tags: syncbridge

SyncBridge is the flagship product. The application that will enable you to share and edit the calendars of family, friends and colleagues all using iCal. It’s the biggest product of the three, with the most complexity and obviously the most features! I’m using it at the moment and the flexibility over iCal/WebDAV is simply amazing! I know it’s been “nearly done” for a while now but we want to make sure it’s rock solid for deployment!

SyncBridge GE is the edition of SyncBridge that will allow you to view and edit your Google Calendar from the relative safety of iCal. Progress on this has been very quick and we reckon we could release very soon.

SyncBridge 30 is the edition of SyncBridge that will allow you to use iCal to view and edit your 30Boxes calendars. We’ve needed to feed back some changes to the 30Boxes team at 83Degrees and we’re getting good results from them.

I guess I’m asking you, the readers, what you use. Which has the greatest urgency for you? Do you want SyncBridge immediately so that you can get sharig those calendars with friends and family? Do you want to get jiggy with Google Calendar and be able to edit it and view it offline froma rich desktop client? Are you a big fan of 30 Boxes and can’t consider any other online calendaring solution? Is there another online calendar that you simply cannot do without? We will listen.

After that, we’ll be wanting to talk to you again about other itches that need scratched. Would you care to suggest any? If you poke us, we’ll likely leak some future product ideas in the comments 🙂

Planning on selling to everyone?

Aidan posted about making technology (and concepts) a bit more accessible to the rank and file of internet users. There is a followup which says that a big problem with accessibility of new technology is the language barrier. In Europe alone, most people seem to speak their own language and English (except the English, who … Continue reading “Planning on selling to everyone?”

Why would you ignore the 80-odd million people in Germany? What about France? Spain? China? They have money too!

We’ve secured the French and Spanish translators….a few more to go I reckon!

Creating Delighted Customers?

If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, achieve something by reading this entry on the Creating Passionate Users blog. We’re traditionally taught that we have to under-promise and over-deliver if we want to create satisfied customers. We have to exceed a customers expectations by setting the expectations correctly. Well, this post says BOLLOCKS to that. We … Continue reading “Creating Delighted Customers?”

If you consider yourself an entrepreneur, achieve something by reading this entry on the Creating Passionate Users blog.

We’re traditionally taught that we have to under-promise and over-deliver if we want to create satisfied customers. We have to exceed a customers expectations by setting the expectations correctly.

Well, this post says BOLLOCKS to that.

We should be aiming to create CUSTOMER DELIGHT through the use of unexpected context. What the heck does that mean?

The most sterling example is – imagine an airline allowing you to change your economy flight ticket without slapping on a huge fee? Imagine if, due to the fact “a filled seat now is better than a filled seat later today”, they actually gave you a credit on your account?

I have some ideas on this but I’ll need to check with Aidan later on whether we can do them. I think it’d be cool.

Hitting the target (a.k.a. “web 2.0, what’s that”)

MJ and I spend a lot of time talking about software development trends, the web (and the various buzzes around web 2.0). Robert Scoble blogged about the problem facing every tech company, and it got me to thinking. How much do people in the IT industry actually know about the trends in their own industry? … Continue reading “Hitting the target (a.k.a. “web 2.0, what’s that”)”

MJ and I spend a lot of time talking about software development trends, the web (and the various buzzes around web 2.0). Robert Scoble blogged about the problem facing every tech company, and it got me to thinking. How much do people in the IT industry actually know about the trends in their own industry? (Infurious is not a web 2.0 company. We’re writing software for the Mac. We just happen to be passionate about innovation and shiny new toys :-))

I went around the office today (in the day job), and asked people here what they know about web 2.0, blogs, tags, etc. No-one that I spoke to had any real idea what I was talking about. These are not stupid people, nor are they ignorant, they just don’t read blogs or get involved in the web community. One person actually said “web 2.0, what’s that?” when he overheard me talking about it.

The point I’m trying (poorly) to make is that it doesn’t matter whether someone outside a target market knows anything about your product or trends, etc. It’s ensuring that people within your target market/industry do know about you, your product, your buzzwords or whatever. And that target market might not be what you think it is – it could be argued that most people in IT would be market for web 2.0 (I know it’s not a product, but I’m extending the idea of brand to include buzzword). And yet, a large section of the IT industry won’t care, even those who write web-based applications for a living.

Before identifying how to market your product, you need to know who you’re marketing to. I struggled with this while writing SyncBridge, because I thought the product was for people like me, where “me” means a software geek. MJ steered me right (after several discussions) that the product was for people like me, where “me” means a person who relies on a Mac for daily work – in our case, mostly SMEs in print, media, design, etc.

How do we intend to market to those people? I’ll leave that to MJ to post on another day 🙂

Technorati Tags: web2.0, syncbridge

Typo comments feed not working

The comments feed wasn’t working in our Typo install (as of build 1055 which is the latest at time of writing). This was also reported on the Typo Trac, so I’ve posted the solution there. Technorati Tags: typo Related posts: Moving from WEBrick to lighttpd/FastCGI in Nitro RubyCocoa SyncServices wrapper Hitting the target (a.k.a. “web … Continue reading “Typo comments feed not working”

The comments feed wasn’t working in our Typo install (as of build 1055 which is the latest at time of writing). This was also reported on the Typo Trac, so I’ve posted the solution there.

Technorati Tags: typo

Google Calendar? 30 Boxes? Yahoo!?

I sent a request to Google, asking if they’d be interested in partnering with us to allow people to sync iCal with Google Calendar (using SyncBridge). According to their terms of use, we can’t release any code which is for commercial use. The relevant part is: If you want to make commercial use of Google … Continue reading “Google Calendar? 30 Boxes? Yahoo!?”

If you want to make commercial use of Google Calendar, including but not limited to selling or distributing Google Calendar for payment, you must enter into an agreement with Google or obtain Google’s written permission in advance.

I spent some time looking at the API, and I’m confident that it won’t be too difficult to re-use a lot of SyncBridge to develop this functionality.

I’ve also spent a bit of time looking at the 30 Boxes API. From what I can see, there is no way to request a list of calendar events based on their last modified date, which means that providing two-way synchronization would be a very costly exercise (you’d have to download all your calendars every time you synced).

Unfortunately, Yahoo! don’t seem to have an API for their calendar :-/

Technorati Tags: calendar, syncbridge

Typo upgrade

We upgraded Typo to the ‘trunk’ from subversion, pretty much without any issues. As a result, we now have a few improved services (e.g. comment RSS feed now works, as do trackbacks in general, improved anti-spam for comments). We’ve also tweaked the CSS slightly to make it a bit more readable. Apologies for any fun … Continue reading “Typo upgrade”

Moving from WEBrick to lighttpd/FastCGI in Nitro

As we rapidly approach our semi-public Beta stage, I’ve switched from using WEBrick to Lighttpd (or ‘lightie’ as they like to call it *shudder*) as the web server. This also means switching to FastCGI. A brief overview on Oxyliquit gives the configuration that you’ll need which usually lives in /etc/lighttpd.conf on Linux or /usr/local/etc/lighttpd.conf on … Continue reading “Moving from WEBrick to lighttpd/FastCGI in Nitro”

Here are some issues I’ve run into, in the hope that they’ll be useful to someone else.

When starting lighttpd, if I have more than one fcgi process (min-procs and/or max-procs > 1), Nitro starts the Og.setup once for each process. This means that you have to turn off schema evolution (:evolve_schema => false) and obviously make Og not drop the database at start-up (:destroy => false).

Nitro doesn’t know what your template directory is by default under fcgi. In your run.rb (or whatever script you use to start your Nitro app) insert Template.root = '/path/to/your/template/dir' before you start your app.

Nitro (and Og) doesn’t log everything properly into your log/app.log. This is some weirdness in the code base, which hopefully will get tracked down (possibly by me), but as a work around (thanks Brian!) put the following two lines at the top of your run.rb:

require 'glue/logger' Logger.set Logger.new('/path/to/your/app.log')

Finally, if like me you’re using Nitro/Og in a REST-style manner, you may want to get access to the body of any post request. In WEBrick I did this with request.raw_body, but this doesn’t work with FastCGI. Unfortunately, there is no workaround for this that I can find, so I’ll be writing a fix tonight, and posting to the Nitro mailing list (and here in the comments).

Technorati Tags: lighttpd, nitro, fastcgi, ruby

The Art of the Business Card

Business cards are tricky things. You meet people, exchange cards and wonder if it will be responded to. The conventional wisdom is also to put as much information as possible onto the card so that the individual has no excuse not to be able to get in contact including but not limited to telephone number … Continue reading “The Art of the Business Card”

Business cards are tricky things. You meet people, exchange cards and wonder if it will be responded to.

The conventional wisdom is also to put as much information as possible onto the card so that the individual has no excuse not to be able to get in contact including but not limited to telephone number (with or without international dialling codes), fax number, pager number, web site, email address, street address, their name, their company name, their position in the corporate hierarchy, some blurb about what the company does, a logo. How about a small thumbnail of the holder? How about a ~~pithy joke~~ witty remark on the reverse. And all in colour.

That’s an awful lot of data to cram onto a small card. In today’s digital world, how many people will use a pager? How many people will write a letter? How much of the writing on these cards could be replaced with “whitespace”?

We’re a small company. I mean, there’s only two of us at the moment. We’re also “Bedouin” by necessity (as well as by plan). We don’t have anyone available to answer telephone queries. In fact, with the exception of some official paperwork, we’re entirely virtual. You want to speak to me? Email me and ask for my VOIP line. Or we can meet in person. Even if we grow much larger, I don’t see much point in greatly increasing the amount of data on the card.

Distilling the essence of a business card is what we did. At the end of the day, Infurious is a brand and we want to get the name out there. Hence our business cards reflect that. It should provide you with just enough “data” to find out some “information”.

That’s not to say that the approach wasn’t met with some resistance especially from our friends. But the first public test was certainly interesting and the search referrals in the website log files were just as interesting. Provide people with the most basic of information and they will find you. Google is your friend.

Anyway, I’ve waxed on long enough without actually showing anyone the card. You can see it here:

The reverse is plain white (because you may want to scribble a note on it). We’ve had some very good reactions (Wow, very minimalist and avant-garde!) as well as some not entirely positive ones (But what if I want to phone you?) What do you think? Do you think that’s entirely enough information for a startup to provide on their business card?

Seems weird not to have it for the Mac

A new game,Tremulous has released some binaries and source for Windows and Linux. Is it just me but does it actually feel weird that it’s not available as a DMG for Mac OS X? I guess I’ve been used to recent developments being available Mac-first or Mac-early. Tremulous is a free, open source game that … Continue reading “Seems weird not to have it for the Mac”

Tremulous is a free, open source game that blends a team based FPS with elements of an RTS. Players can choose from 2 unique races, aliens and humans. Players on both teams are able to build working structures in-game like an RTS. These structures provide many functions, the most important being spawning. The designated builders must ensure there are spawn structures or other players will not be able to rejoin the game after death. Other structures provide automated base defense (to some degree), healing functions and much more…

To their credit, in the FAQ they answer the question:
In order to get a Mac version you need to do one of three things: 1) buy us a Mac. 2) fix Mac ioq3. 3) find somebody else to fix ioq3.

Someone on their forums has managed to get it working though.

Maybe it’s the whole alpha geek thing but I just assume that “cool new stuff” will be available on the Mac.