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…

SKTimeStamp

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… 

StExBar

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.

Essential PIM

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.

BuildAutomator

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.

Empower

BizSpark

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.

The Business Of Software

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.

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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!

MixAction is still being coded.  Ironically I released another application a few weeks ago that would have taken a little over a quarter of the time allocated to write MixAction last year in the June 30 day stint.  More on that, which relates to the topic of this post, in a moment.

At the end of last month we bit the bullet and moved from sole trader status and incorporated.  We have a nice shiny new company called “MixAction Software And Audio Pty Ltd”.  For readers not from Australia that’s the approximate equivalent to an LLC.

There are distinct advantages and distinct disadvantages to this move.  I won’t go into those here right now.

BoomerApp And Klik ‘n Mix

Klik n’ Mix is a little “party” mixing package aimed squarely at the non “disco” and “dance” crowd.  It’s a B2C application, which goes against my own business principles quite a bit.  It retails at two price points.  The dreaded $29.99 that I’ve maligned so frequently and $49.99, an upsell that adds a range of audio tools.  I wrote it because I was asked to write it by a person who does entertainment at parties and functions.  This particular person is more entertainer than “DJ” and from experience there’s quite a few of those out there.  It doesn’t beat mix and that’s reflected directly by the price.  I’m saving my beat mixing algorithm for later – and a higer price point. 

Once written I figured I might as well market it and created the brand name and product site accordingly.  You can visit the product site here:  http://www.kliknmix.com

I’m pretty sure it’s currently the only party music mixing package to feature the Microsoft Fluent UI – AKA “The Ribbon”.  I suspect that particular differentiation is short lived. 

As I said, I’ve been pretty full on time wise, so I’ve done very little marketing of the application.  A few weeks ago however a new service was launched from the people who brought the world Bits du Jour.  That service is BoomerApp.  While Bits du Jour hands out full licences daily BoomerApp is instead a rebate system where-by the customer purchases in the normal way and recieves a rebate form which they return to FastSpring Ecommerce or a local representive.

FastSpring have a blog article on BoomerApp here:

Customers pay the retail price up-front, and then print out the special rebate form to claim their discount.  The site’s model is based on the fact that a certain percentage of customers will not redeem their rebate despite that we make it easy to do so and that a certain percentage will accept an alternate offer in lieu of redeeming their rebate.

Take a look at BoomerApp.com and contact them if you’d like to be considered for a promotion (not all products will fit the offer profile, but mention you’re a FastSpring client and they will review your product right away for a potential promotion).

The developer sets the rate of rebate for the offer.  Given some interesting data on rebate return rates, which I will discuss later, the application is live right now and therefore probably best not to advertise business data to passing clients, I decided to go with the full 100% rebate.  That is the client pays the full price and then can send in the rebate form to recieve the whole lot back.  By my calculations I have little to lose by treating this as a promotional exercise and getting the application “out there”.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes – and I will report back on it at the end of the promotion – it runs seven days, from today.  The report I give will probably be percentage based and not dollar based – we’ll see… 

Cheers!

Scott Kane

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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…

SKTimeStamp

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… 

StExBar

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.

Essential PIM

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.

BuildAutomator

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.

Byte Shield

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!

Empower

BizSpark

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.

The Business Of Software

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.

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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

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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

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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

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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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I’m into my old developer “bad habits” working the “Stunday”.  When I was a corporate dev’ we referred to the day between Saturday and Sunday as “Stunday”, the “day all the stuff needing done gets done”. There have been a lot of “Stunday’s” this week! 

In fact I’m actually so tired this is going to be a brief post as I can’t keep the old eyes open to much longer, not through lack of trying I might add!

I’ve been digging away like a wombat on heat all week.  Still got a bit of the GUI to write for the “30 Day and Release” application, but most of it is done now.  The biggest issue was building/buying/finding appropriate icons for the “Project Templates” dialog.  Adobe Fireworks has started to feel like home. 

File structure is finished (again) after I had some problems with the encryption routines corrupting the data.  While I could certainly extract the files clean and stream them back without problem I couldn’t do a “Project File Repair” without really screwing things up, and given folks will be spending potentially a fair amount of time building a project – and everything is in one file – it’s pretty important that it can be repaired.  So for the moment encryption is turned off, file repair is working and at some point I’ll revisit it to find out exactly what’s going on in that department.  Given the 30 Day and release deadline this seemed the wisest course for now. 

I like working with “objects”, I hate interacting with arrays all the time in code, objects are easier to maintain IMHO.  Arrays (and I’m talking over a hundred elements or more) in the main applications code will become a maintenance nightmare later on.  Given that the XML files contain elements or “fields” numbers of that nature (to make things easier for the customer, conversely means more work for us) I’ve written objects to take care of read and write for arrays (from streams) and present them in much the same manner as datasets in the application (bound controls as well in fact).  So at the price of two days I have a couple of objects that handle all operations from reading, saving, loading and accessing individual elements of an XML file and I’m rather glad I took the time to do it.  If there had been a nice native Delphi object alone that did this task the way I needed I’d have purchased it, but alas there is not that I could find (and I looked very hard).  Delphi has the TClientDataset but it has its own XML format (which is so bloody stupid if you think about it that it bares no consideration) which would have totally buggered things up as far as cross platform goes at a later date.

Then the database threw a wobbly.  Runs cool as a cucumber under XP but totally screw’s itself under Vista at a few thousand records.   Fixed now and better than ever, but a bit of perspiration there for a moment, solution was thanks in a large part to a friend of mine, Glenn Crouch.   In short I bailed on the file format and used another one.  Still proprietary, not available commercially, stores millions of records more (in fact I ran a burn in test on it out to 4 Gig file size and it handled it fine, theoretical max is around 6 gig but I won’t advertise that to the end user).  It’s only storing a listing of files (media) on a customer’s computer and it’s a convenience factor more than anything but I will be doing some more tests inside a VM to find out where it actually does break. 

So a lot of coding and day one of the 30 Days hasn’t even started technically, but well worth it. 

I have the domain names for the application (I’ve actually got the domain name for the “pro” version as well), I bought them a few months ago and have decided to build the site using Joomla and a nice Web 2.0 style template.  It has all the nice stuff in it like cute lightboxes that popup for screenshots, scrolling galleries (if I decide I need them), but I’ve chosen to use Joomla again because I firmly believe in the SEO value of articles and Joomla excels at this – with a mod to generate SEO friendly URL’s rather than those horrible one’s CMS systems produce by default (and it’s working nicely too).

I have the logo, icon, company logo (I’ll put them up here to view in the coming weeks) and a bunch of other bits and pieces that are needed.  I’ve chosen FastSpring as my payment processor (and man is their customer service *good*). 

I’m sticking with my web host Dewahost, they’ve been pretty good to me, Eddy from Sales there is always ready to help out and it’s been a long time since I felt comfortable with a web host, so Dewahost it is.  However I have an online store module in the program and that will involve a good degree of media streaming.  Amazon S3 looks like the way to go here and I’m going to sign up soon for an account and give them a test (worth having if for no other reason than for off-site backups.  You can’t beat the price they are touting for the beta).  Thanks to Bob Walsh for this tip.

OK.  Time to call it a day, it’s Saturday tomorrow and that’s exclusively for the Trouble and Strife and Tea Pot Lids (family time I’ve learned is crucial for their survival as well as my own).

Next week the “30 Days” begins and I still have a little more GUI to do, but it’s pretty much getting into the real logic of the program now, which is where 90% of the work will be, plus getting the website setup/designed properly and I’d like to settle on a exe encryption product.  I have a few in mind, but am yet to make a final decision.  Recommendations are always welcome.  I know most of the main ones, but one never knows what turns up by way of recommendation. 

“Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die tomorrow.”
~James Dean

Soon..

Scott

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