Russian Ninja

There is a big number of apps now that have both an iPhone version and a desktop version. Usually you want to have the data in sync in both versions.

If the app doesn’t have its own web service as well (like Evernote, for example) then it usually resorts to various quirks that let you sync the data between the devices via wifi. That really is not convenient at all — you have to launch the app both on the desktop and the iPhone before the sync will happen.

So, what would be the most natural way to do the sync then? Of course, through iTunes, which already syncs all kinds of data between your desktop and your iPhone.

What Apple needs to do is to create an API for the developers to hook into this whole sync operation both on the iPhone and the desktop sides. An app can register itself in the sync framework and then an option to sync that app’s data would appear in the usual place in iTunes, you check it and it’s done — next time you connect your iPhone to your desktop the data for the app would be automatically synced.

PS. I want this feature for Things and 1Password.

Ideas Apple, iPhone, iTunes

Just completed a survey for Apple regarding the quality of the repair service for my Mac. One question in particular caught my attention –

What aspect of your repair experience had the greatest impact on your responses to this survey?

Isn’t that pure genious? All that questions they also asked like how quickly the laptop was repaired, etc might not really represent what is important for me and thousands of other customers.

For example, why try to increase the speed of repair if majority of customers would indicate that all they care about is when they are updated about the state of repair in a timely fashion?

If asked directly to rate the speed of the repair, they can answer that it was not good, for a higher level manager such answer might indicate that there is a problem. But the manager in this case thinks that he knows what’s important for the customer when in fact without that additional question in the quote above he doesn’t have any clue.

What seems obvious might easily be wrong.

Thoughts Software Business

Having a good program manager is one of the secret formulas to making really great software. And you probably don’t have one on your team, because most teams don’t.

via How to be a program manager – Joel on Software.

We called this position a product manager instead in Stuffed Guys, but otherwise, it was exactly as Joel described with an addition of doing support as well (since we are a small company, plus support allows to be closer to the actual users and understand better what they need).

At first I was a product manager, then Ivan. But we desperately needed a separate person for that, who will not program and only manage (these two activities don’t mix well). Hopefully next time we will be more lucky and have a good product manager from the start.

This is more a note to myself to use the Joel’s article as is to describe to a person what we need from him or her.

Whatnot Software Business, Software Development, Stuffed Guys

I got it and it’s wirelessly amazing!

And yes, macro-no-flash mode rules in Canon IXUS.

Whatnot Design

And again Eric Sink writes things that I tend to agree with –

Do you work as part of a software team? Here’s a piece of advice for you:

Read the diffs.

Every morning before you start your own coding tasks, use your favorite diff tool to look at all the changes that everybody else checked in the day before.

via Read the Diffs.

We, in the Skoosh development team use this quite a lot. Our code is in CVS and we use a neat tool called CVSSpam which emails colored diffs of all commits submitted to the repository to all the developers.

So many times I’ve discovered bugs (including my own) just by reading the diffs in the email after the commit. It’s really a nice (and easy) way to review the code.

Whatnot Software Development

I am continuing to setup my work environment on the Mac and I am evaluating an app called Things to manage all my tasks. It has a companion app for the iPhone which syncs with the desktop app via WiFi, so this makes it pretty convenient.

Today I was investigating the possibility of Things to sync with iCal and what good this can do to me. It appears there is not much to it. The ToDos from Things appear as ToDos in iCal in a sidebar, they of course don’t get added to the main calendar view since only Events can go there.

This got me thinking. What’s the difference between an Event and a ToDo? It appears that a difference for me is very small. I definitely want to see my Events in the list of my ToDos for today. If I need to go to a shopping center today, I want this to be in my main list of tasks that are due today. Although it’s an Event and I have set a specific time when it should happen, I still need to know that it exists at all when planning my day.

So, to recap, it appears that an Event is just a ToDo with a certain date and time attached to it. Things and iCal don’t do a good job to realize this concept. But I think I definitely nailed it down here at least as my personal most convenient way to work on tasks planning.

I’ll keep this in mind for my future experiements with project management software.

Thoughts Mac, Project Management, Things

Just finished playing a wonderful classic point-and-click adventure game called “A Vampyre Story” (done by people involved with The Curse of Monkey Island).

One of the best games I played in the last several years, definitely recommended, especially if you are a classic adventure fan.

My Macbook Pro has become my 3rd console (the other two are PS3 and Xbox360). When I am done working on it in the evening, I restart in Windows Vista and start playing Windows-only games. Great fun.

It’s a pity they don’t have A Vampyre Story on Steam, but it is still possible to purchase and download it online (for example, here), which I did.

Digital distribution rocks, especially when it is not limited geographically. The game is not available in the retail shops here, but I was able to buy it online and was playing in no time.

Nice!

Whatnot Games

Because “ls” is shorter then “dir”.

Whatnot Unix, Windows

First product released by Stuffed Guys (in what I call “Phase 2″ of the company’s life) was Stuffed Tracker 2.0.

I remember the fear that I had right after the release. There were no sales for maybe 20 first days, we had no evidence that anybody would purchase our software at all. This was very depressing time, especially since we’ve almost burned through all of our money by that time (Stuffed Tracker 2.0 development took about 9 months and we were developing our second product, Factory Nova, in parallel as well).

When one late evening, when I was already at home, I’ve finally got an email notification from ShareIt that somebody just made the first purchase of our product I’ve experienced one of the happiest moments in my life. And I was not the only one so excited, when I’ve sent a text message to Ivan’s mobile (Ivan is the Stuffed Tracker’s one and only programmer) that we’ve just got our first sale, he immediately called me back, although he was out of the city and it was really late at night!

After the first sale, people started purchasing Stuffed Tracker licenses regularly, but for many months, at the beginning of the month, when, for example, we were not getting any sales for the first five days, the fear that there would be no more purchases was returning to me again and again. It seemed that although we had purchases before already, it didn’t prove anything — maybe that was a coincidence, a fluctuation and nobody would buy anything anymore.

Only after five or six months I finally got a feeling that sales won’t stop, that it’s a trend and not a random fluctuation, that we’ve created something that people really want to buy and that the whole products business model works.

I hope this small story will help to build confidence in someone who is only preparing their first software product for a launch. Just create a great product (don’t forget to market it too!) and the sales will come. Guaranteed.

Whatnot Software Business, Stuffed Guys, Stuffed Tracker

Moral: upsell at point of sale, customers are handing over the money already, so why not give them more buying opportunities.

via The Business of Software – Upselling – Support Contracts.

That’s one of the missed opportunities for us in Stuffed Guys and a note for the future. We discussed this, it’s pretty easy to implement in any sales system, including ShareIt, which we’ve personally used. But we never got around to doing this, unfortunately.

The original post talks about upselling support contracts, we thought about upselling additinal sites licenses for Stuffed Tracker, or additional projects/users licenses for Factory Nova.

Thoughts, Whatnot Software Business, Stuffed Guys