Mark Roseman's Blog

Holidays.

Things have still been fairly steady... getting a lot of requests in from different people for stuff to go into CourseForum and ProjectForum. Need to squeeze in a couple little tweaks into 4.1 yet, and trying to map out stuff for 4.2, which should be an incremental feature bump... tentatively several improvements in file uploading/handling, enterprise permissions, and possibly search. Quite a few other good ideas that I'm trying to figure out the best way of working in too, either in 4.2 or beyond. Of course, nothing finalized yet.

I dislike traveling right around Christmas and New Year's (too many other people doing the same thing combined with the unpredictability of weather this time of year), and we've managed pretty well to avoid it the last few years. Pauline's brother arrived here yesterday for a visit, and then we're heading back to Edmonton early Jan 5th, and then returning late on the 9th. So probably not too much happening until after that...

Snow!

Yikes, what a huge pile of snow out there! Certainly didn't get that when we were in Hamilton... reminded me of growing up in Winnipeg. Been out to shovel twice already this morning. On the plus side, also been the first chance I've had to get some cross-country skiing in for a while... spent a bit of time tooling around the trails (and streets) around here.

RIM.

Now that we're in Waterloo, I think the expected thing is to be a big cheerleader for RIM, who despite the ongoing legal things, really seems to be on a roll lately. Waterloo is a quite small city, so the impact that has is even more magnified. We're in a newer, fairly upscale neighborhood, and there's a pretty good number of people around here who bought their houses by cashing in their RIM options. The guy at the place we bought our home theatre system from had a few choice stories as well, no surprise. It's a bit odd seeing the number of Blackberries at our gym, though admittedly that is right across the street from the RIM campus. And they've still got well over a hundred job openings locally.

This is Dedication.

Via Slashdot, this story about the guys who got the Graphing Calculator into the first PowerPC Mac's, despite having their project cancelled, no official access to the building, etc. A great read for anyone who wants to know the lengths some people will go to do software that they really believe in. Or who are really nuts.

microISV Reality.

Another interesting idea.. and the guy who's running it is close to local. Hmm...

Micro-ISV.

Thanks to JCW for passing along this article on finding product ideas that are relevant to very small Independent Software Vendors. Along the same line, the microisv.com blog looks to be a potentially useful resource.

Home Theatre.

Paid off the line of credit from the initial move-in expenses, so we got ourselves a home theatre system as a pre-Christmas gift (Pauline had insisted we get the big TV when we first moved in). Nothing too fancy, since it wasn't going into a room really built for it... our living room is lots of bare walls and hardwood, opening onto our kitchen which is lots of wood and ceramic tiles, so a total echo chamber. Our brief shopping excursions told me that was not the kind of thing I'd want to learn about and try to stay on top of! But, we got a decent setup for what we wanted, and now have more gadgets and remote controls to learn how to operate.

ProjectForum Year in Review.

While Gus and Brent have done port-mortems on their most recent versions, I think with CF/PF 4.1 now in beta, and given the time of year, it's worth taking a broader look back at my stuff, though less on the technical side.

A year ago was version 3.1, which was probably about the time where I stopped feeling seriously embarassed about one aspect or another of CourseForum and ProjectForum, whether it was things that didn't work quite right, obvious missing features, etc. Since that time I've thought of the product as "finished", not in the sense of there's no more work that should be done, but in the sense that what was there was wholly acceptable to most people as is, but additional things could still be done to differentiate it, and truly make it shine.

While the last year did include a few major new additions (the campus/enterprise licensing options probably the biggest), by and large the changes have been incremental, whether filling in holes, adding some nice additions, making things a bit easier or work a bit better. While the product today is more recognizably similar to the version of a year ago, I also firmly believe it is a much better product today. Gradual evolution is not a bad thing.

Another big addition was the hosting service, launched just over a year ago, which has also really taken off. It was a no-brainer, and should have probably been done sooner. On the other hand, devoting the needed energy to get that up and going would also have detracted from the mainline development, and meant getting to the "non-embarassing" point would have taken longer. For the earlier adopters, they wanted to run their own anyway. Now with the rough edges smoothed out, it's appealing to a broader audience, where more and more are interested in having us host. Still need to smooth out some rough edges on the hosting process itself now.

Financially, things have grown well, and even slightly exceeded the milestones I'd set for this year. That's always nice to see happen. Online advertising has played a bigger piece of the marketing than I'd have expected, which I suppose is both a reflection of the maturity of the online advertising market, as well as a happy peculiarity about our specific market.

Some of the marketing efforts I hoped I'd get to have fallen behind, so that will definitely be a focus for next year. Two in particular, with w8nc and CharityChannel, are really great win-wins and I feel terrible for procrastinating. Some of the other things I thought I knew what I wanted to do with (e.g. company branding etc.) I'm more puzzled about how to pursue than I thought earlier.

So, all in all, I have to say I'm pretty happy with where things are at, and how things are looking for the next while. The work long ago crossed the viability threshold in my mind, I'm still enjoying it, and it seems to be providing something that a lot of other people find quite valuable and worthwhile. Works for me.

Forbes Article on Wikis.

LeadingProject.

The ConceptDraw guys have released what looks like a Microsoft Project-like tool - Mac and Windows. Haven't checked it out, and don't have a need for it right now, but I know in the past it's been a bitch trying to find decent task/project/resource tracking software that worked on the Mac.