Cabel Sasser from Panic Software the guys who make Transmit (great FTP software for the Mac and the excellent Coda web dev software ) talks about how they started and about their process etc.

Steven Frank, co-founder of Panic software who make great Mac software including Transmit and Coda blogs about how a product succeeds in the marketplace.

From the post: "My current hypothesis is that there are at least three positions of prominence in each segment—three ways to be number one, if you will: The First One, The Free One, and The Good One." Full blog post here: The First, The Free and The Good...

We would tend to agree with that one.

We are experimenting with Twitter here in the office. It started off with me trying to figure out why it is so popular and has since degenerated into comedy and some scary conversations, especially viewed out of context. My initial thoughts were that Irish people would be too cynical to use this, but we will see.

You see my Twitter posts here just in case you are curious: http://twitter.com/naoise_g

I am using the spiffy app Twitteriffic on the Mac to keep it updated and it also updated the status menu on iChat.

I am starting to see how it could be useful, but it seems mostly a fun diversion so far.


Update:
Video explaining Twitter.

Paul Graham on six principles for making new things: "I like to find (a) simple solutions (b) to overlooked problems (c) that actually need to be solved, and (d) deliver them as informally as possible, (e) starting with a very crude version 1, then (f) iterating rapidly."

Full article here...

This very much sums up our approach to a couple of products that are currently in development. It works. Of course the next step is making it a success once it's made. So we will probably just repeat process again there. Though the version that makes it to the public won't be the crude version 1.

Of course the advantage of working on your own product is you have more opportunity to iterate. This is rarely done on service based projects, due mainly to time constraints(poor planning) and possibly financial. Which is a shame as it really impacts quality.

We now have 4 bids in for Rails Manager application. The prices vary quite a bit and also it difficult to determine what the price will end out at as some are offering fixed price and some hourly rate. Its also hard to determine how good the people are but I am fairly impressed by the calibre of what I have read anyway.

And we have uploaded our second project up on to the sites today. Its a more web based one so I expect more quotes as web projects seem to draw more quotes anyway.

I've wanted to experiment with some of the outsourcing sites like ODesk for a while now. It always sounds like a good idea but when I head stories about outsourcing it often falls flat.

I've just posted a test job though. You can see it here: Rails Manager

The idea is I'll get someone to build a simple rails manager for Leopard and see what happens. If its good I'll put it up for download. Its a small enough app that its not a big risk and its no risk to our core business.

I'll continue to post updates on how we get on, but I'm getting worried now. The job is posted an hour and we have no bids :(

Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford gives a great presentation on Quality in Software. He covers software development history, management of software projects and solutions for common problems in software development. Is about 48 minutes. Lots more developer related videos over at Yahoo! Theater...

We have put our new mProperty website live. You can see it at www.mproperty.ie

We will be adding new articles to the learning centre and videos to the features sections in the coming weeks and months.

Amusing site for the new book Managing Humans by Micheal Lopp.

Managing Humans

Winners of the Webware 100 are announced.

Details are here...

And some analysis from Webware here...

We are very interested and excited about the new generation of hybrid online/offline web based technologies here at Marino Software. With Ireland still lagging behind the in the broadband stakes these technologies can help our customers with slow connections or who are on the road.

With the likes of Adobe's Apollo platform, Joyent's recently open-sourced Slingshot for Rails applications and now with the just announced Google Gears there is an increasing amount of options available to developers. We are looking forward to enhancing our mProperty offering with these technologies. More on that later...:D

Google have a new blog covering their mapping products. Now, if they would only get some decent maps of Ireland into their products. I have never seen an explanation for why Google has terrible maps for Ireland. Does anybody know?
Both Yahoo maps and Microsoft's live maps have proper detailed maps for Ireland so is a mystery to me as to why Googles are so poor.

World Wind from Nasa, an open source project now available in Java looks to be a really interesting project. At the JavaOne conference in San Francisco Sun's CTO of software and Patrick Hogan of Nasa demonstrate their new open source geospatial browser in this video from CNet.

If you are into David Allens Getting Things Done productivity system then you have a good few options on the Mac for software tools designed specifially for the task.

My favourite is iGTD by Bartek Bargiel. I use this all time and is my favourite by far. It syncs with iCal and also works with iSync, supports tags, links and address book integration.
Next thing I would love to see would be some team based features such as support for syncing with Basecamp and sharing tasks with other users.

Omnifocus from Omnigroup is looking good too, but is still in development as of this post.
They posted a video recently showing how it will work (Quicktime).

Other options I have used are:

Midnight Inbox
Actiontastic
Ghost Action

There is a useful Wikipedia entry here covering GTD software across all platforms.

Panic software which makes the excellent Transmit FTP client for the Mac has released a new web development application called Coda aimed at the professional web designer. I downloaded it last night and tried it out and it really is a beautiful piece of software. I particularly liked the code completion on Coda. John Gruber has a good write-up on Coda on his Daring Fireball blog.

I currently use a combination of TextMate (great editor, especially since we work with Ruby on Rails), CSSEdit and Transmit. Am happy with this set-up, but Coda is certainly tempting. MacRabbit the makers of CSSEdit have just released an update to 2.5, which adds some great new features and improvements including tabs. Am looking forward to see what the new version of TextMate brings. :)

My favourite things about all the above software mentioned is their elegance and simplicity.

The only thing that is really missing for me at this point is a great Subversion Client. At the moment I use the cross platform Java based SmartSVN but it just does not have the polish that native Mac apps like CSSEdit or Coda have.

So all these lovely updates along with the recently released Adobe Creative Suite updates makes these happy days for a web designer using a Mac. Yeah, we love our Macs here.

Some interesting insights from an ex Adobe Illustrator product manager on the building of software and how features are introduced to an already established product.

The features for the second iteration of our product mProperty are driven by a combination of feedback from our sales channels/customers and ideas developed within Marino Software to solve specific problems identified in our target market. A big advantage for us is that our target market for mProperty is very clearly defined, but as we move forward with additional strategies for this product we need to factor in new audiences for the product such as designers/ developers and sales channels that are not within the company. The challenge here of course is keeping the simplicity, usability and vision of your product intact while reaching out and facilitating new audiences.

The big frustration we had when working for web agencies in the past, is that you worked to often crazy deadlines with rushed and poorly defined objectives with design by committee ruining what creativity might have managed to survive the process. Then as the project goes live you jumped to the next project though maybe some great ideas were developed during the development phase which just get lost as it is not in the project scope etc.

With regards web based software as a product, the joy in all this is that we get to constantly refine and improve our product offering. And for our customers they benefit from our focus and long term commitment.

Following on from our previous post on the importance of quality photography for selling property here are a couple of web based photo editors that are free and easy to use. They do all the basics to fix those unruly photos.

Picnik (Nice clean User Interface)

Pixenate (From Irish company Sxoop Technologies based in Cork)

The New York Times has an interesting tool for comparing the costs of renting or buying equivalent homes. Try it out here...

I love the interface on this. Simple and useful.