I’m often viewed as a luddite when I suggest avoiding fancy pants, gadgety interfaces for software applications. A fictional example? SmartCompany wants to build an application that allows team mangers to take the score sheets from their sports team home, scan them and store them online, and then (insert features here)…..

High level meetings like this get me thinking about interfaces. In this useless example, paper is the interface and it currently works just fine. Why mess with it?

The problem I see over and over again is failing to recognize these successful interfaces and instead assuming that they pale in comparison to the new technological ones you’re planning to create and sell. That’s often not the case. At least for a minute take a step back and assume that the existing interfaces are there because they just plain work.

A good example of this thinking is ScanCafe. I haven’t tried them out, I’ve just read about them at CoolTools. What I like is that instead of building an application that requires users to migrate to a new interface (digital camera, scanners, etc), they’ve stuck with what user’s already know how to work with (prints, slides, negatives, mail, etc).

“Here is how it works: You pack up your images and mail them to ScanCafe’s headquarters in Northern California. They count them up, and repackage them before shipping the pieces to India. In India they are scanned, touched up, rotated and then privately posted to your account at their website. You then go through the images online and select which ones you’d like to keep.”

I’m moving on from my now almost 3 year old Dell Latitude laptop. Originally purchased as a desktop replacement, it and it’s lovely docking station served the need quite well for the first year or two. It’s since been relegated to the status of email, browsing, and remoting into my desktop. For that role it’s too damn clunky.

That combined with our dollar and a silly sale at Lenovo.com, which ends today!, adds up to me purchasing the ultraportable x61. To get the lowest price, around $1200, I had to ship it to a US address but at that price it was hard not to pull the trigger. I upgraded to 2GB ram and a 100 GB, 7200 rpm drive. There are reports out there of up to 10 to 12 hours battery life. That seems insane to me but even 6 would be a dream at that size and weight.

Now I have to wait calmly until I can get my mitts on it….

Check out microPledge, they’re bringing micro pledges to the software space.

“Have an idea? Just need funding?
Want to join with others to support to an idea?
This site is for you.”

We’re booked to run our third demo camp on Wednesday Nov 7th, once again at the Albion. Please sign up here to attend and come out and check it out. If you’re interested in demo’ing, contact me asap.

Bryan and I demo’d the horribly named itsaFramework at DemoCampToronto14 last night. Of course I forgot to mention it’s name or website until the absolute last question when someone asked “does it have a name?”. There’s a good reason I have nothing to do with marketing.

There’s basically no information at the site above. If people are looking for more information, just contact me. If there’s a lot of requests for info then we’ll get a wiki or something available.

Thanks again to David, Jay and the entire TorCamp crew for putting on the event and allowing us to demo.

When I recently moved back to a *nix environment, I started where I was most familiar. That was Fedora Core since I was previously a Red Hat user. I found it a tad painful and quickly gave ubuntu a test run and I’ve been happily using it for a while now. My original plan, however, was to get onto a bsd variant. I’ve only dabbled with pc-bsd and haven’t had much time for more.

I’m not really in the mood to make another OS change and this article comparing ubuntu to pc-bsd isn’t helping. I have to agree with everything in here from my limited trials, especially the responsiveness. Lately I’m finding my windows image on vmware painfully slow as well.

Crap, time for another change?

I have to say this. The second thing I noticed about the list for the upcoming, and sold out!, DemoCampToronto is that if you remove my demo from that list then 1/2 of the demo’s have already presented at DemoCampGuelph! I love that! I think there’s always an assumption that us little towns play second fiddle. It’s exciting to see that not only are we getting the same caliber of demo’s as the big city boys but in some cases we’re getting to see them first! If you haven’t come out to a DemoCampGuelph then get yer arse to the next one!

So are we the DemoCamp ‘farm system’? I’m happy with that if it means we continue to get the level of demo’s we seen and we get to see them first.

If you haven’t come out to a DemoCampGuelph, then sign up for the next one here. Yes, we still haven’t picked a date for it yet, details, details….

I applied a while back to demo at the next DemoCampToronto. David mentioned that there was a lot of applicants to demo so I put it out of my mind, pretty much assuming I wouldn’t be demo’ing. According to this, I was selected to demo, AND the event is ‘sold out’. The only reason I know this is from an email someone sent me after seeing me on that list.

Oh man, I think this means I need to get a demo together. Um…and the actual framework…..Looking at the list of demo’s, I have no idea how I got selected. Those other apps sounds fancy.

5 minutes, 300 people, oy…..

Our site started out as a single page as a bit of a stop gap. It’s growing on me and others don’t seem to mind it either. Steve submitted the site full single and it’s the current featured site.

I’m going to the store, you need something?

“Sherrands is a coordination tool that can help you save valuable time and money. How? By using those circles that overlap with our friends and coworkers. Say I need something that is only available up north, and I live in the city. I would need to drive up north just to pick up one or two items. This is not very efficient. But let’s say I have a friend or coworker who works up north, and I don’t need the item right away. I can ask them to get it for me, and I can pay them back. I have now saved the time and gas getting there and back, and my friend or coworker is right near the store so they haven’t wasted much if anything in the process for the favor. And if they need something near me, I can do the same for them.”