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Learning from the web

While Paul Graham and many others have pointed out the virtues of web compared to normal desktop software. For Nemo Documents, working as a file manager for local files, it was quite clear that we needed a desktop application. Given this how could we then apply as much of the good things about the web into developing a Windows application?

We quickly decided on WPF as it allows one much greater freedom in designing the application. We wanted something visually appealing and in this I think we succeeded (whether that is the case, is of course not up to me to decide :-)). But at least it is not the ordinary ugly grey programs that are so common in the Windows world. As for WPF as a framework I’m quite torn. On one side, it allows one to do a lot of fancy stuff, but on the other side there is way too-much architecture astronauting in the framework and that really hurts when you’re just trying to get something done. jQuery is a good example of how to do this right.

Another thing to learn from the web is to watch the error log and quickly fix problems people are seeing. There is nothing more frustrating as a user than software that is not working, so we made it virtue to respond quickly to errors and to get new versions into the hands of people. With the build-in auto-update feature of Visual Studio, it’s quite easy to keep already installed versions updated. It’s not quite as smooth as updated code on a server, but it goes a long way. And I really think that providing excellent customer support is key these days. When it’s so easy to go “next-door” one has to provide exceptional service to retain users.

The last point also goes hand-in-hand with agile. Getting software out and into the hands of people to get early feedback and use that to better shape the software to fit real needs. We try to release new features when we consider them stable enough for ourselves to use. And that doesn’t have to be every half year 🙂 We recently did this with the google calendar and google docs integration. A feature we coded and rolled out a month after the initial release.

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Blog

Microfunding

I’ve recently joined flattr (that’s the icon on the right you can see :-)), and just last week I read about some students from NYU who got almost 200.000$ in funding through kickstarter to write an open source facebook clone. Something is definitely buzzing in the micropayment world.

When you look at kickstarter and flattr, they are attacking the same problem, funding, at different angles. Kickstarter tries to get all the funding up front, while flattr is more of a tip jar model for something already produced. So in a way, they are complementary. I would argue that they both work best if the content is placed into the public one way or another. And that is where I think there is a huge potential.

Something like flattr creates an alternative to paywalls and an alternative to ads. And that is something I would very much like to see.

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Programming

mucomp released into the wild

Today I’m happy to announce that the world is one audio player richer! This is a personal project of mine that I have been working on for a little while. It’s written in clojure and javascript (jQuery) and uses alsaplayer as the audio player. I probably won’t have much time to hack on it, so consider this a code dump that hopefully someone else will find useful and play/run/do-whatever with. As for maturity I use it almost daily and it’s pretty stable. There are some known bugs and kinks (mostly due to that its using alsaplayer and that the java inotify library is buggy).

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iola

Django Alliance

Being small and agile has many advances, but sometimes people confuse it with being fragile. Although one could argue that betting on a single-vendors proprietary solution would be a more fragile business proposition. Anyway, to make people feel safer buying web systems developed in Django and Python based on Open Source, we have had a finger in the creation of the Django Alliance. The web site complements Django People with a focus on companies rather than on single individuals.