Russian Ninja

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

I can’t stop thinking after reading a post like this on the 37signals blog that the guys in 37signals just constantly try to find an excuse for themselves. They do the same thing regularly with posts related to their Basecamp and the simple nature of their software.

A business plan. Right. My business plan for Stuffed Guys, for example, predicted the sales almost down to a dollar. Does it make my business planning skills exceptional, standing out of the crowd? I doubt it very much.

Of course you shouldn’t use numbers in your business plan made out of thin air, the numbers should be based on something (in my case — previous experience), but a business plan works, and it sets a clear direction for the company for years.

Whatnot 37signals, Software Business

I just decided to give another try to Google’s browser called Chrome. I’ve tried it when it was only launched initially and didn’t really get what’s so special about it.

The first thing I’ve noticed now that I am on Mac is that although Chrome is based on the same open-source Webkit engine that Safari uses, Chrome is currently only available for Windows. Unfortunate (and hopefully temporary), but not a big problem in this age when Macs can run Windows without problems.

Not sure if they had this great comics-style explanation of what Chrome is all about before, but this time I’ve checked it out and it make things very clear.

The most important feature (for me at least) is that each tab in Chrome is actually a separate process in the operating system, so theoretically you can easily identify tabs (or sites) that consume most of the resources, including memory. Chrome even has its own task manager, which shows what resources each tab consumes!

I am not sure if browsers such as Firefox work the same way processes/threads wise on every operating system, but certainly for Windows independently processed tabs is a cool and innovative feature. Google engineers definitely have something interesting going on in Chrome.

What struck me as important is the mention of the “Gears guys” in the comic who were saying that

One of the problems with the browsers is that they’re inherently single-threaded. For example, once you have Javascript executing, it’s going to keep going, and the browser can’t do anything else until Javascript returns control to the browsers.

In a response to this, Chrome engineers decided to go with this separate process tabs, but this is of course only a partial solution. And maybe even not a solution at all. Certainly you can isolate Javascript-heavy web apps in separate tabs, close the tabs if they become unresponsive and etc.

But it would be way cooler if Chrome actually made it possible to run Javascript in the page in separate threads like Gears guys were suggesting. That would tremendously help the developers of Javascript/Ajax-based web apps. You can do pretty complex things in the background with Javascript while the whole page remains as responsive and interactive as before.

I wonder if that’s technically possible at all, why Chrome engineeres decided not to go this way?

Thoughts, Whatnot Chrome, Google