BoomerApp Promotion On A Brand New Product. 100% Rebate. Klik n' Mix
Last Updated on Wednesday, 3 February 2010 08:40 Written by scott kane Monday, 23 November 2009 10:49
Last post I indicated I’ve been pretty much flat out like a lizard drinking. I wish more of it was on code!!
A number of things have changed these last few months. I somehow ended up elected a State Executive member of the Australian Democrats and a National Deputy President of the party as well. There’s some pre-selection things going on there I won’t go into presently in respect of the next Federal Election – which is going to be anywhere between March and November next year, with a decided possibility of middle of August – unless the Conservatives (Liberals) and the Socialists (Labor) magically come to some kind of agreement over climate change legislation. That the Greens are playing “my way or the highway” is pretty sad. Negotiate? Yer doin’ it wrong!
Tools For Startups
Last Updated on Saturday, 23 August 2008 09:33 Written by scott kane Saturday, 23 August 2008 09:33
Tortoise SVN
I’m not a fan of FOS or GNU as a general rule, but there are exceptions and Tortoise is one of them. Probably the best source control tool I’ve used. Super fast to install, extremely easy to configure and use. If you’re not using source control, and you should, then check out the Tortoise. Click the Tortoise logo to visit the official site and download…
Nifty little tool, a shell extension, for changing file/folder dates. Handy as well for the war on script kiddies. Change your build, leave the build number the same and change the time stamp to the previous build date. Voila! You’ll have them shout lamer at the script kiddie within hours… 
I wish MS had thought of the options this little trick extends to Explorer. Solves quite a few issues, as with the two above it’s open source and free to use.
I actually use two PIM like applications, this little one is my scratch pad for to do lists each day. There are two editions, standard (free) and Pro. Nicely written. If you’ve not got a PIM or aren’t happy with the one you have now (some are so darned bloated) then check this one out.
I’ve blogged about this tool and it’s the build tool I use now. The price is affordable, it’s well maintained and support is superb. BuildAutomator shaves heaps of time off the build process, Arnor is always improving it. If there are two tools on this page I think are must have’s for startups it’s Tortoise and BuildAutomator.
WordPress
OK, yes, this blog runs off WordPress. But I’m also using it as a CMS for the MixAction website (our primary product). I’m blown away, having been a long time Joomla! user, at just how darn good it is as a CMS. It’s takes some tweaking, requires some specific plugins, but once done it really is terrrific. While Joomla is awesome for large sites, for a single product site I heartily recommend WordPress. So much so I’m going to do a series of articles on this blog in the future on how to go about running an ISV’s single product website right off of it…
Oh – and if you don’t have a blog, what on Earth are you waiting for?
Not Sure about starting and running your own blog? No worries. Grab yourself a copy of Blog Blazers. Written by fellow ISV Steph Grenier it’s packed full of intereviews, tips and hints from some of the ‘nets brightest blogging sparks. Should be on every bloggers bookshelf. http://www.blogblazers.com/ I’m writing a review on this blog on Steph’s book and will update this with a link to the review in the coming weeks.
How to Generate Traffic to your Website is another must have book from Steph. Published as an easy to read (and economical to buy) e-book this high quality tome has some great little tips and techniques. I admit I’ve never had a lot of trouble with SEO. It’s simple if you follow, as I’ve always done, some basic logic and choose to avoid trying to game the engines as quality information beats black or white hat SEO techniques everytime. Confused about black and white hats? Throw away the nonsense you’ve read on this, you don’t need the hats. Grab a copy from http://www.followsteph.com/how-to-generate-traffic-to-your-website.html and learn that like most things in this business a professional, structured approach is worth it’s weight in gold. For my own review of this book here on this blog you can Click Here.
We’ve tried various tools over the years for protection of our software and licensing. From Armadillo to our own weird and wonderful routines. While we still code defensively and use some other tools ByteShield is the chosen tool for our theater audio product’s – MixAction- protection. Flexibile, durable and smart. Highly recommended!
Either one (or both) of these membership schemes represent excellent value to mISV’s and ISV’s. So far we have joined BizSpark with a view towards joining Empower in the near future. Both bring many advantages to the startup including, but not limited to, server side technology (BizSpark) MSDN memberships, access to Windows desktop and server operating systems, business software including office, complete IDE’s including .Net and much, much more. Plus access to marketing and support, all for prices that make these one of the best startup packages available today. If you’re not a member of one of these you are missing out on a lot of great startup assistance!
Registration Service
I’m a bit critical of some of the registration service options available to ISV’s. Franky most of them suck and I’m not short of saying so when they’ve done something untoward.
However! There are two companies I have no hesitation in recommending. They are:
FastSpring and NorthStarSolutions.
Why? It’s a matter of two issues. Integrity and experience. Both FastSpring and NorthStar Solutions, both seperate companies run by seperate people, have both in abundance. Both companies fall over themselves to help you. Make no mistake either - you *need* two registration companies. First because the Internet does funny things, no point missing a sale if for some reason your customer can’t reach one solution - it happens to any of us. Second is that some people have personal preferences.
Run by Joel Sposky.
OK, not so much a “tool” in the traditional sense, more like an addiction. Seriously, a good resource for asking questions related to starting up, but be cautious, there are an army of anonymous trolls waiting for the unwary, like most internet forums. Post links to your website with care if asking for feedback. Consider that you might not want some of that feedback appearing in Google searches later on down the track.
CDROO Music And Sound Effects For Video And Podcasts, Theater Cues
CDROO is a resource run by me, aimed squarley at people, such as Micro ISV’s, who need economical access to original, royalty free music and sound effects for their online videos, sales presentations, training tools and podcasts.
CDROO music and sound effects are 100% Royalty Free, so you never have to pay another cent after you purchase music and sound from us.
More coming as soon as I have a few moments…
**All Product Names, Trademarks And Logos Belong To Their Respective Owners.
Day 41 – The RC Waiting Game
Last Updated on Saturday, 12 July 2008 01:44 Written by scott kane Saturday, 12 July 2008 01:44
First feedback for RC 1 showed a few issues – lucky I was there in person to handle them. Mostly installer problems that I’ve addressed now. So the first of my “circle” of folks who actually get to download and test without me being there were notified tonight.
Now one of the worst parts of all. Waiting for show stoppers.
I learned a great deal today about a company offering a unique and extremely interesting licensing system for software developers. I’m going to blog about that more when I have more details, but chatting this afternoon on the phone to Jan from ByteShield has me intrigued – indeed extremely impressed! So stay tuned next week and I’ll let you know what I find out. I’m getting a demo of the system on Monday and am looking forward to seeing how it all goes together. Note that this is server side technology primarily and is not an exe wrapper or anything like that. That they are partnered with my favorite e-Commerce people FastSpring makes if very attractive indeed.
Still done pretty much zero work on the website. Now RC 1 is out I’m hoping I can attend to that next week, tomorrow being Saturday and my “day off” with the family.
I’m also going to do something really odd. If MixAction goes to release before July 21st 2008 I’m going to do another 30 Day sprint for Mixerlicious starting – all things being equal – August 1st 2008. So I’ll do another 30 Days of blogging on progress, while also handling any “issues” with MixAction and ironing out some of the marketing stuff related to that.
The actual product name Mixerlicious have been switched to another type of product all together, still building up to a much larger B2B only application, but the latter will be marketed under a different name.
So if you’re in anyway interested in comparing the first “30 Day” product (that took longer than 30 Days for sure) with a second back to back then you might want to follow along.
I have a reason for dong this – apart from insanity – I have another political campaign to fight in November and simply won’t have the time after September to work flat out like a lizard drinking coding. Plus. I learnt so much from the June 30 Day exercise I’m bursting my britches to implement some of those lessons.
Anyway – have a great weekend, it’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere – but here in the Southern it’s cold and icy (OK, frosty, no real ice in Melbourne – we don’t do snow to often and when it does it’s kind of like icing sugar unless you are on one of our few tall mountains).
Scott Kane
Quote of the day:
People ask for criticism, but they only want praise. – W. Somerset Maugham
Day 27 -Help Files & When Bugs Are Features
Last Updated on Friday, 27 June 2008 10:13 Written by scott kane Friday, 27 June 2008 10:13
Pretty much spent the whole day writing the help file documentation today. More on that in a moment.
Yesterday I declared a code freeze. However today I became aware of a little bug that was cosmetically annoying.
MixAction has a little indicator arrow in the playlist, similar to how iTunes does, showing the currently playing track. Under certain conditions this indicator gets saved to the meta file for the playlist and ends up showing each time that playlist is played until that certain condition raises it’s head again. Undesirable. Or so I thought…
Then it occurred to me that this could actually be a neat feature. Power goes out or program closed accidentally somehow in a performance? No worries. MixAction remembers the track you were playing even if you don’t. Added some code to make sure it resets properly if there is no interruption but let it show the indicator if that condition isn’t met. So a bug, albeit a cosmetic one, ended up being a feature.
OK. The help file. I don’t know about you but for me writing a help file is kind of like having each toe nail extracted without anesthetic and then the perpetrator moving to each finger on each hand. Deliriously painful.
So I got around half way through today and I’ve ground to a stop now. I’ve also been working on the website, so it’s not like I had my head in the help compiler WYSIWYG tool all day, it just feels that way.
What this means is that tomorrow I’ll have to stick my head back into it and complete the job. But hope is in sight as the hardest of it is completed now, though it will require massive expansion and tweaking at a later date.
Sue from Alta WebWorks completed my website template and It’s looking beautiful. Now I’ve got to write the content. But before I get to far with that I want to re-read Bob Walsh’s ISV e-book to try and make things as sharp as possible.
Uploaded 100 serials to start FastSpring off with for order fulfillment last night. Enough to get things started in that respect.
I have identified a few issues I need to bug fix before handing off to the testers and I’m sure there are a few I’ve not spotted.
At the end of the 30 Days I intend to write an article here that summarizes some of the issues I’ve bumped into. Decisions I’ve made that worked and the many that either did not or I wish I had done differently.
Believe it or not I have a bunch of things to add to the project after release that were either pulled during the 30 Days due to time or were a direct result of either making an earlier decision in respect of something else. Plus I’m making some features part of the sales strategy and will not be putting the code for those in the trial version at all.
I’ll also be talking about scope in respect of taking on a relatively complex application, though at the same time relatively small feature set, in a period of 30 Days. Even with a heck of a lot of stuff prepared nothing prepares you for doing what all of us have been doing this last 30 Days. I’ve worked as a corporate developer, project lead, department manager and private consultant and everything in between. But the 30 Day lead time we put ourselves into is one of the hardest I’ve ever done – if not the hardest.
And I’ve loved every minute of it.
Later…
Quote of the day:
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. – Aristotle
Day 26 – Code Freeze
Last Updated on Thursday, 26 June 2008 11:54 Written by scott kane Thursday, 26 June 2008 11:54
Survived the gale force winds with no issues as all. Though the wind gusts picked up to equivalent of of a Category 3 cyclone in some parts of Melbourne over night. Amazing weather! Thankfully very little damage in general around town. Seems most of it was high level in most places.
Coded in the 30 Day trial. Yet to link in the voice over nag. Setting that for Saturday.
Now have two builds, trial and full version. Full version, separate download, can be registered, trial version can not.
At least in theory.
Spent most of the day making that smooth and doing UI’s for registration, nag etc.
As of tonight I’ve frozen the code barring major hobble gobbles and of course linking in help topics, after the help file is complete.
Tomorrow it’s into the help file. I prefer to have this done concurrent to development. However the 30 Day pace made this difficult as things changed fast. So quite a bit to do on it tomorrow.
Phillip, one of the 30 Dayers, blogged today about a great product called Dr Explain. I’m very familiar with this program, written by smart ISV Dennis Crane. It’s a great program and it’s on my shopping list for later on. For this help file though I’ll be doing it the hard way – boot strappers eat your heart out!!
On Saturday I’ll be going into my “studio” for the first time in a month for the purpose of recording the voice over nag. This room doubles up for several things, I used to code in it as well, but it contains my vocal booth and I can get the isolation needed for the voice. Not so long ago I would not have been able to do this task as my voice was still cracking from the flu, that took several weeks to clear. In the voice over business a mere cold can be devastating.
Once recorded I’ve got to work out a neat way of making sure some Jolly Roger doesn’t just strip it out of the resources or replace it with something else. I’m thinking CRC at this time in terms of the resource. Can’t think of anything secure for this.
I think we really do, me included, get very lost in the whole “avoid the cracker” routine to the detriment of what we do best – code applications. It’s hard to divorce one’s self from this, but I’m determined to give it my best shot.
Certainly the server log stat’s for this blog that I published some weeks ago, and will update at the end of this month, certainly do indicate a lot of folks out there are looking for the output of criminals.
A recent talkback radio program in Melbourne had it’s fair share of sycophants ringing in to justify the practice of online theft, not surprisingly none of them could see the point when a guest psychologist reversed the situation as an example pertaining to their property. But then if they could they’d not be sycophants.
And there I go again… 
OK. Hoping to also do a final once over on Saturday and build the installer. Got some more internal testing to do in VM’s and then, better late than never, get some folks to test externally.
Saw a sneak preview of my website being designed by Sue at Alta WebWorks. It’s looking absolutely scrumptious. I can hardly wait for it to be ready to launch!
Been going over the online store at FastSpring. I love their back end. It’s so darn elegant and easy to use!
I also have to say I love the support I receive from the guys who own/run/manage FastSpring. I regularly get emails from my account manager Ken White there asking if I’m ready to roll as he wants to integrate the store to my website. I’ve never experienced this level of service and I’m blown away.
Last night the CEO Dan Engel emailed. For these guys to care about a tiny mISV who’s not even launched yet speaks volumes about how committed they are to looking after their people. Kudos to them.
I’m usually leery of direct recommendations, they come rarely from me, but in this instance they’ve earnt my respect because of this and I recommend them to everybody wholeheartedly and without reservation. If you’re looking for a better deal, are tired of the DR now we charge you, now we charge you some more, vendor and customer two step – then these guys are the medicine you’ve been looking for! Do yourself a favor and checkout FastSpring.
Oh – and no, they’re not paying me for saying that, for the benefit of those who are of the suspicious bent.
OK. Enough for today. Big day ahead in the land of documentation!
Quote of the day:
An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex. – Aldous Huxley
Day 25 : Security 'n Stuff
Last Updated on Wednesday, 25 June 2008 10:30 Written by scott kane Wednesday, 25 June 2008 10:30
Short post tonight, as I started the day late and have a bunch more work to do before I run out of steam. We have a gale force wind warning alert current. This usually sees me offline for a variety of reasons, and of course if we lose power I can’t access anything.
First up. Yesterday I attended a “school play” that my eldest daughter was in. As it was a juniors thing it wasn’t a fully fledged production. It was great. But I’m biased. <g> However what was interesting was that many of the acts relied on pre-recorded audio.
They had a great sound system (proper theater with PA built in) that sounded very nice. Except they couldn’t find the odd track here and there so lots of delays between acts and then disaster struck. The one and only CD player on the system died.
Obviously a laser related issue, probably having trouble reading due to grotty fingers on the CD. This caused a bit of a mess and in the end they had to get a tiny portable CD player and point that at the audience.
What was interesting to me, though doubtless a major PITA for the academic staff, was that this was exactly what MixAction is designed to avoid. Not being able to find tracks and the unreliability of CD’s in a live situation.
CD’s have never been great on the road. As an ex DJ the old vinyl records were certainly one thing – reliable.
Skipping inexplicably? Toss a 1 cent piece onto the tone arm and away it played.
Can’t do that with a CD, even the “pro” ones that have advanced cueing functions.
I would have loved to have told them about the software, but for the moment bit my tongue.
OK. The original implementation I was intending to use for serial numbers, based on a rather cool variation of PKV is not ready. It works and works well but the developer still has it in beta and as he’s very busy right now it won’t be finalized in time for me to use from the go get.
So I’ve cobbled together something simpler, for the time being. Still PKV based but nowhere near as many key variations embedded.
I’ve purchased some security software from Oreans today. As this seems to be the best on the market security wise AFAICT I’ll use it to secure the critical sections. Basically virtual machine technology is employed to wrap the desired sections of code.
Decided that I’ll be offering a trial download that can’t be registered for the time being. Customer will need to download the “registerable” version after purchase.
Reasoning is that it’s not a big download and eventually I’ll be adding extra “functions” to the registered version that aren’t in the basic trial – nice to have but not needed for trying out the product – as this is supported by FastSpring who will be handling order processing. So even if I am cracked, and I dare say I will be, at least they won’t have the full version. Doesn’t protect against stolen CC’s and subsequent torrent hosting of course. But then – what does? :-/
Basically an expiring link to the full version download.
Multiple versions aren’t hard to manage, especially if you’re using build automation software.
FastSpring will also be handling key distribution as I don’t want to put myself in the position of having to worry about
OK. More tomorrow. Got to put in the registration and trial stuff actually into the app, setup the conditional defines etc for builds.
Still have a few things to tidy up and a fair bit more work on the help file. No installer done yet either.
Quote of the day:
I never forget a face, but in your case I’ll be glad to make an exception. – Groucho Marx
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