I've been using the defect tracking / customer support software FogBugz - brainchild of blogging A-lister Joel Spolsky - for a few years now and I've been a big fan. I've used it for work as well as for home projects such as my beloved John's Background Switcher and it's made my life a million times easier. Anybody who writes software, whether for money or fun, needs some form of bug tracking in their life if they want to remain organised (even a simple spreadsheet will do). But FogBugz is much more than a mere bug tracker though.

I also use it to handle all the email that comes into my web site. I get frequent requests for new features or help with my background switcher (as well as random emails about all sorts) and that all gets fed directly into FogBugz. This means I can track each person's request from replying to them for clarification and having a conversation, turning it into a feature for a future version of JBS that I can estimate, decide which version to put it in, implement it (it also hooks into my source control) and create a release note that turns up in the release notes (not surprisingly). It does this all without any thought from me and I don't need to keep a hundred things in my head at once (I can manage about 7 then things start to fall out of it). The chance of me screwing something up, not replying to someone or completely forgetting about a suggestion gets reduced to zero. I also use the discussion forum functionality when I run beta tests of JBS so when people find a problem I can turn that into a bug and fix it with full circle visibility (i.e. I can look at the bug and go directly to the forum post or see the code change I made to implement it and so on).

While I don't use FogBugz at my current place of work (although I would if I could) if I were to run my own company I know I could use it to handle everything from customer support to defect tracking and release management. Nice.

When Fog Creek requested beta testers for the long awaited FogBugz 6 I jumped at the chance. Having seen an alpha version running on Joel On Software I knew it contained a Wiki which would plug a hole that FogBugz 5 had. While it was great for tracking features, bugs and emails, writing a spec and documentation would happen outside FogBugz which was less than ideal. Integrating a Wiki would be cool.

So for the last couple of months I've been testing and using FogBugz 6 and despite being initially a bit shocked by the redesign (mostly because once you get used to something any change seems scary - see below) I like it and really think it's a big step forward.

The wiki implementation is great and it's encouraged me to sit down and write some specs for big features for JBS (about time too) as well as keeping notes like my list of beta testers and such things in one handy place. When combined with community users - which means anybody can create an account in my FogBugz and I can give access to wikis and discussion forums of my choosing - I'll be able to interact much more closely with people using my software.

There are loads of new features which you can read all about in Fog Creek's What's New page but one of the really cool ones is 'Evidence-Based Scheduling'. It's a rather clever way of predicting the probability that you'll be able to ship versions of your software by certain dates. Each developer can estimate how long each task and, taking into account how accurate each developer has been in past estimates, you can see a fancy graph that lets you see the probabilities. Like the following which shows that it's 94% likely that I'll be able to release JBS 3.2 on October 3rd if I work solidly on it from now until then (which I won't):

The more releases you go through the more accurate it will be and the more confident you'll become with it. It's rather clever and something I'd love to use at work where release dates are a lot more important than on my own projects.

There are more new features than you can shake a stick at (including a much more powerful search system) and I'm really impressed by it. I'll continue recommending FogBugz to anybody who'll listen with more enthusiasm than ever as it's quite simply the best solution I've come across for managing the whole product development process (not just the software development part, I mean everything) by a country mile. Fog Creek now offer a hosted version of FogBugz so you don't even have to set up your own server if you don't want to. There's no excuse to not give it a try - you won't be disappointed.

One of the effects of User Account Control on Windows Vista is that whenever you run a software installer you are asked to confirm if you really want to run it and if you agree, you are either elevated to the mighty powers of an Administrator or you’re asked to enter the credentials of one. The idea behind this is to make sure that you don’t accidentally install something dodgy or some evil software doesn’t manage to install itself without you knowing about it.

It can be quite annoying although it is a useful measure against spyware and malware. However, when launching my installer for John’s Background Switcher I would get this rather scary dialog:

Windows Vista cares a lot more about digital signatures than previous versions of Windows. To obtain a digital certificate to sign your software you have to go through an authorisation process to verifiably identify your company or yourself. If you’re a malware author you’re not likely to get a digital certificate because it costs money, you’d have to identify yourself to an issuing authority and as soon as you’re reported for making malware your certificate would be revoked. So if the installer you run is digitally signed with a valid certificate Windows Vista can be pretty sure it’s not likely to be evil software that’ll take over your computer. In this case it presents a much prettier dialog that’s far less likely to scare any normal user into cancelling. And there’s no orange in sight.

For this reason (and because I thought it would be cool) I decided to stump up a bit of cash and buy my own digital certificate in my name (since I don’t have my own company). After sending a copy of my passport to the issuing authority I can now sign any software I create so that it’s uniquely identified as coming from me. So now when you run my installer you’re shown this:

It’s a far friendlier dialog and I hope that people being presented with it are much less suspicious that my software has some evil, ulterior motive. Also, if someone tampers with my installer, the signature will become invalid and Windows will complain.

It’s a bit of a pain having to pay for a digital certificate to stop Windows from scaring off potential users but I guess that’s thanks to all those dodgy malware authors out there exploiting the formerly trusting nature of Windows. Grrrr.

I’ve been a Microsoft Windows user since Windows 3.1. I remember the day I upgraded to Windows 95 and it felt like going from the stone age to the iron age - the Start Menu seemed like a great idea and it looked fantastic - my world was changed forever. I’ve been using Windows ever since and as soon as the latest version - Windows Vista - was released, I installed it and started using it day-to-day as I mentioned before.

Initially I liked Vista, I was impressed by some of the cool animations and effects, I liked the icons and there seemed like a few decent improvements over XP. It was quite snappy and everything appeared to work rather well. Of course, as is to be expected of Windows, things degrade over time. It’s slowed down a lot, various pieces of Microsoft software crash from time to time and the “Do you want to perform the following action?” dialog that pops up often from UAC just gets annoying and seems like a poor solution to spyware and viruses after a while. Frankly, I think Vista is a huge disappointment and my disappointment was about to get a lot bigger.

While attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London I noticed a lot of attendees used Macs. My friend John Topley, who I was attending with, has been trying to get me to buy a Mac for years and had a MacBook with him. As he started showing me the software you get with it I was blown away. It was absolutely clear that a lot of the new GUI (Graphical User Interface) in Vista is directly copied from Mac OS X - except it makes more sense in the Mac as all of the GUI conforms to the same rules. Straight out of the box there’s a bunch of useful software to let you create music, video, photo books and a host of other things you have to pay for with Windows. I looked at the Mac vs. PC adverts and they started to make sense - Windows machines are work-orientated and pretty dull on the whole, whereas Macs seemed more fun and creative at heart. And I’d lost count of the number of bloggers out there who’ve switched from PCs to Mac and never looked back.

John then wrote ‘The Case For The Mac‘ on my site (a very good read) and I was sold. I finally ordered a MacBook with a view to replacing my Vista laptop and desktop. I didn’t want to write about it immediately as I decided to live with a Mac for a month or so to really get a feel for what it’s like. That time has come.

Quite frankly, I’ll never buy another PC. Everything they say about Macs is true - “it just works”. You get so used to having to tweak Windows to get things to work correctly, from graphics cards to the registry to a hundred other things. Not so on the Mac. One of the first things I did was connect to my home wireless network which was a simple case of picking it from a list, entering my WEP key and that was it. I went on holiday the other week and brought my MacBook and my Dell laptop running Vista. To connect to the local wi-fi on my Mac took perhaps 10 seconds start to finish and I was surfing the web. To do the same on Vista took 5 minutes. I had to connect and re-connect about 6 times before it would stick, each time I had to go through a 3 step wizard and I got sick of hitting the same buttons over and over again. I started to get frustrated with Windows in a way I never did before. I was being asked a load of questions it should know the answer to - and the Mac was smart enough to make these decisions itself.

I’ve had tears running down my cheeks making crazy photos with software called Photo Booth that comes with a Mac. You use the built in camera to take your picture but it applies some mad effects live that you can preview, like the one pictured right (I don’t really look like that). The software isn’t particularly useful but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and you just wouldn’t get something like that bundled on a PC.

As I mentioned you get lots of useful, creative software bundled with a Mac, called iLife. The software all integrates really well and lets you create music using Garage Band (there are hundreds of loops you can use to create very professional music - oh, and you can sing or record your own instruments too), manage and edit your photos in iPhoto, play music in iTunes, make movies with iMovie and there’s a host of other things that are fun and creative. The software is very well thought out and easy to use, taking the power of great GUI design to a level I’ve never seen before on Windows. For the first time in a long time I’ve felt a surge of creativity since getting my Mac - suddenly I want to try and write music, create a movie and do a whole bunch of other things I’d never have thought about on a PC.

I’ve often wanted to create a DVD you can play on any DVD player with a slideshow of some of my photos - that way I could send it to my dad and he could see my holiday pictures, etc. Can you do this on Windows out of the box? I’ve never been able to - so I’d have to go and search and buy some software and it’s just never been worth the effort. Can I do it on my Mac? Easy, I can go from start to finish in a couple of minutes and it’s really obvious how to do it. And that’s just one of a hundred common things you’d want to do that would require buying more software on a PC that comes as standard on a Mac.

The MacBook itself is really well thought out. Having a magnetic power lead means if someone trips over your cable, it just pops out and doesn’t drag your MacBook onto the floor. This has saved my skin several times already! When you shut the lid it goes to sleep, but a little light on the front slowly dims and lights up to indicate a heartbeat so you know it’s in sleep mode rather than off. Open the lid and it springs back to life - do the same on a Vista-powered PC and it springs back to life after a little while, but then it has to re-connect the wi-fi and all in it can take a couple of minutes. That’s not good enough.

The lid of the MacBook doesn’t have some rubbish catch you need to slide across to open, it’s magnetic. The built in camera is pretty impressive and “just works”. They even look incredibly cool (and I love that the Apple logo on the lid lights up when you use it). It’s amazing how beautiful design can influence your thinking.

I read the OS X Missing Manual to really get to grips with all the shortcuts and differences between the Mac and PC but within a week or two I was quite at home on my Mac. I doubt you could switch from a Mac to a PC and be as settled so quickly.

Regular readers know that John’s Background Switcher 3 is just around the corner (a few days away to be precise). They’ll also know that it’s written on Windows but I’ve got a Mac now, does that mean it’s dead? Well no.

I also bought Parallels which allows me to run Windows applications inside my Mac - the best of both worlds. I installed Windows XP (because I trust XP) and can run Visual Studio 2005 alongside my usual Mac software. In fact the last few beta builds of JBS 3 have been built on a Mac and you’d never know! It just works.

I find myself going into work - where I use Vista - and cursing at how slow it is, being frustrated at how it forgets all my folder display settings, gnashing my teeth every time I’m asked to confirm that I really do want to run an application I’ve just launched (like Visual Studio 2005), swearing every time software hangs or crashes and getting annoyed in a hundred other tiny ways. They’re just little things, but they add up and I find myself thinking “it’s much better on a Mac”.

So far I’ve managed to persuade one friend to buy himself a Mac and you might be next! The thing is, you just need to sit down and use one for 5 minutes to realise that you’ll never want to go back to a PC again. Do believe the hype.

I spent today at the MSDN Technical Roadshow in the fair town of Harrogate. It's strange but wherever I go - even back home to the place that I grew up - I never bump into anyone I know. It's like I'm permanently anonymous and I've kind of gotten used to that fact. I remember going out on a stag do once where one of the guys there was the sort of bloke who knew everybody - wherever he went someone would come up to him and ask him how he was - I've always been the opposite.

So imagine my surprise today when I bumped into an ex-colleague. As if that wasn't surprising enough, I then proceeded to bump into a guy I play football with over in Skipton (whom I didn't even realise was a developer). Just as my eyebrows were returning to their normal position from being raised well beyond recommended safety levels another ex-colleague walked up to me and said hello. He then pointed out that he was in fact there with yet another ex-colleague! His first words to me after not having seen me for a year or so was "you've got more grey hairs than me!" which made me laugh. (Note: I disagree with his assessment).

I was starting to get the hang of picking out people I know and it was just as well as I then spied another ex-colleague I'd rather not have to speak to so I kept my head down. "You ain't seen me, right…".

The roadshow itself was very interesting. I make it a point to not look at pre-beta Microsoft software since it's invariably got some really cool features that I wish I could use now but won't be available publicly for a year. Now having been forced to see some of these things I can see a lot of it will be quite useful, particularly LINQ in C#. I look forward to checking it all out. But the real surprise for me was meeting so many people I know - I guess I've been living in Yorkshire too long that I feel I'm starting to belong here!

Hi, it’s John here. No, not John Conners, but John Topley. I’m the friend who persuaded John to attend the Future Of Web Apps conference that John’s been blogging about recently. For reasons best known to himself John has decided to turn over the keys to his blog to me. Which means I’ve got a golden opportunity to take her out for a spin, but what to write about? As I’ve been nagging John for some time to buy a Mac—you may have seen my slightly tongue-in-cheek comments to that effect scattered throughout his blog—I thought I’d try to present a (hopefully) intelligent list of reasons as to why you should make your next computer an Apple Mac. I promise that I’ll try not to come across as an Apple zealot (hey, I don’t even own a black turtleneck sweater), with the proviso that I do find it hard not to be enthusiastic about Macs. If all I do is annoy you then I’m sorry, and rest assured that this blog will soon return to the scheduled programme of great photography tips, articles about which hairdryer you should buy and all the other weird and wonderful musings from the world of John Conners.

At this point you may be letting out dark mutterings to the effect that I’ve got some nerve and don’t I know that this is a Windows heartland and the home of legendary Windows software John’s Background Switcher. In fact, I might not be as deep into enemy territory as it first appears. I’ve actually been using Windows for about fourteen years and I still use it at work. You know, for pie charts and spreadsheets and stuff. I’ve written software for Windows, both for fun and professionally. I quite like Windows. I used to like it a lot, but since switching I now officially only quite like Windows. I certainly have a lot of respect for the ubiquity of it and its legendary backwards-compatibility. However, I think the Mac is a better computer for people who really care about their computing experience, in the same way that a BMW is a better car than say, a Toyota, for people who really care about their driving experience. Sorry John, I guess I just lost you the PC-owning Toyota drivers from your demographic! Never mind. Anyway, here are eight top reasons you should buy a Mac.

• Macs are beautiful. The great Alan Kay said that “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware” which is what Apple do, beautifully. I’m not naïve enough to believe that Apple design and make everything in their computers, but they take charge of the most important bits. I’ve always loved Apple’s industrial design but Jonathan Ive and his team have kicked it up to another level in recent years. Apple give you attention to detail that you just don’t get from PC manufacturers. For example, my PowerBook has a column of five lime green LEDs on the underside of the battery that light up when I press a little button, so I can see how much charge is left without switching the computer on. The MacBooks have a magnetic power connecter that will disconnect if you trip over it so that the Mac itself isn’t dragged down onto the floor. When I eject a CD or DVD from the slot on the side of my iMac, exactly half of the disc is ejected with exactly the other half remaining inside the computer. Somebody has actually thought about how much of the disc should be ejected and designed accordingly. The precision of the engineering is breathtaking. This fanatical attention to detail also carries through to the box that the Mac comes in and to the documentation it comes with. The whole experience has been thought about and the result is that the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.
• Macs aren’t cheap. It seems odd to tout the price of Mac ownership as a virtue, but that’s not actually the point I’m about to make. One of the arguments that’s always wheeled out against the Mac is that they’re expensive. Yes, it’s true: Apple don’t make low-end computers in the same way that the prestige German car manufacturers—Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz & Trabant (joking)—don’t make low-end cars. Some people just don’t seem to understand that this is an acceptable way of doing business. Hey, if you want to pay £250 for a cheap PC then more power to you, you’ll almost certainly get more bang for your buck than ever before. However, thanks to the relentless march of Moore’s Law, the high-quality Mac has never been more financially accessible either. You can pick up a cool little Mac mini for £399. Further up the price scale, there have been various comparisons that have shown that price-wise the Mac comes out equal or even less than a PC kitted out with equivalent features and quality of components. So you might say that a Mac is relatively inexpensive but never cheap.
• Macs foster creativity. The Mac includes a piece of software called GarageBand that lets you make your own music by putting together a whole range of musical samples into a sequence. Or you can plug in a keyboard and play something. Or plug in a microphone and record something. This is the sort of thing that professional musicians did twenty years ago with Fairlights that cost £60,000! Oh, and if you like the result you can export it to iTunes. Macs make it easy-peasy to organise your fabulous holiday photos and turn them into a slideshow on a DVD—accompanied by your GarageBand composition from earlier—that you can use to bore your friends and family to tears with. All of these iLife applications work together properly. And if you’re really serious about photography like Mr Conners, then the Mac is the platform of choice. I probably don’t need to mention that Photoshop started out on the Mac, but more recently Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom have been slugging it out in the professional photography software stakes.
• Macs don’t let you down. Like it or not, Windows is (in)famous for going wrong. I’m not talking about the Blue Screen of Death here. I lose respect for people who are still making jibes about Windows crashing, because in my experience Windows has been a rock-solid for years. No, what I’m talking about is the curse of malware. I wouldn’t dream of hooking up a Windows PC to my broadband Internet connection without having the holy triumverate of firewall, anti-virus and anti-spyware software in place. On my Macs I just use the built-in firewall and that’s it. No system is perfect and Apple do release the occasional security update, but it’s nowhere near the torrent of Windows updates that come down the wire every time I boot Windows XP. Irrespective of whether this is because most computers run Windows or whether Mac OS X really is a more secure by design, Macs give you peace of mind. And it’s nice to know that the operating system isn’t wasting resources by constantly having to monitor itself to see if it’s under attack.
• Macs run Mac OS X. Mac OS X is a great operating system. It’s a bit of a mongrel in the sense that it’s taken different bits from all over the place, but like a great chef, it’s combined all those ingredients into a delicious new dish. You get all the power, heritage and command-line tools of FreeBSD UNIX, the amazing development tools and APIs from Steve Jobs’ NeXTSTEP adventure, as well as the drop-dead gorgeous Aqua user interface. Aqua has benefited from being five years ahead of Windows Vista in terms of eye candy—which means that it’s more subtle and requires less hardware. I can get the full Aqua experience with all the transparency, drop shadows and animation with a 64 MB graphics card on my PowerBook. Windows Vista simply can’t do that. Some people have actually installed Vista on their MacBooks and report that not only does the laptop run hotter than under Mac OS X, but the battery life is reduced too. Remember, this is straight test of running the two different operating systems on the same computer. Finally, Mac OS X is easier to buy. It comes in two flavours: home or server and you can buy a five-user family pack for £139. That’s the cost of the full version, not an upgrade disc. Contrast this simplicity and transparency to the six different versions of Windows Vista, not including the forthcoming server versions. Windows Vista Ultimate currently retails on Amazon.co.uk at £313.48 for a single license.
• Macs rock if you’re a software developer. Java, Python, PHP and Ruby are all built in and Ruby on Rails will be in the next version of Mac OS X. You also get a Developer Tools disc that contains lots of extra goodies such as GCC and the various bits you need to start writing your own Mac software, including a decent IDE. Plus you’ve got all the oh-so-handy UNIX stuff only a Terminal window away, including Vi and Emacs; talk about being non-partisan!
• You can run Quicksilver on a Mac. Quicksilver is “a unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.” What the heck does that mean? Just think of it as the closest thing we have to those control-your-computer-by-thinking gizmos that we’ve all seen in sci-fi films. Quicksilver is free software that thanks to its plug-in system can do practically anything. I can press Ctrl + Space and then start typing some letters from a URL and Quicksilver will complete it for me. Hit Enter and I’m in a web browser looking at that site. Or I can type browse and it lets me scoot through the albums, playlists and artists etc. that are in my iTunes library. Or how about this: I can type the name of a file, hit the Tab key and Quicksilver will present me with a list of things that I can do with that file e.g. Copy/Move/Rename/Open With/FTP etc. I can access my clipboard history, Address Book, command line and Gmail all from within Quicksilver with a few keystrokes. To see it is to not quite believe it, and then you see it some more and then you want it.
• You can still run Windows. It’s easier than ever before to run Windows and Windows software on a Mac. When Apple announced they were switching to Intel processors in 2005, many of the Mac faithful got upset. They liked the fact that their beloved Macs were differentiated from PCs right down to the non-x86 architecture PowerPC processor they used. However, moving to Intel has worked out just great. The latest Macs use Intel’s brilliant Core 2 Duo processor which is perfect for running virtual machine software such as Parallels or VMware. I often run Windows XP on my iMac in a Parallels virtual machine to which I’ve allocated 256 MB of RAM. It flies along and is no slower than running Windows on the bare hardware. The latest version of Parallels comes with a thing called Coherence Mode. It’s a wacky name for a killer feature. Essentially it lets you forget that you’re running Windows in a virtual machine because it presents your Windows programs as if they’re native Mac OS X programs. So you can have Excel 2007 nestling amongst iPhoto and GarageBand. Talking about mixing business and pleasure! You can even set it up so that clicking the Parallels Dock icon opens up the Windows Start menu. It’s like they took Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder out of the Ebony and Ivory video and replaced them with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Now everyone can get along in perfect harmony!

Well my head's just about stopped spinning following the Future of Web Apps conference. The third day consisted of a series of workshops, the idea being you chose one for the morning and one for the afternoon.

The morning workshop I chose was Khoi Vinh - who is the design director for NYTimes.com - talking about using a grid technique to design web sites. I hadn't been sure if I'd find this one interesting or not but it turned out to be a fascinating insight into web site design. He's a properly trained graphic designer and unlike me (who used to be a web designer many moons ago) actually knows what he's doing - I'd always had a "keep tweaking until it looks right" approach to design whereas he demonstrated a very impressive technique for designing web content. I left the workshop immediately wanting to redesign this site and any others I can get my hands on so it must have worked!

The afternoon workshop I went to was run by Stefan Magdalinski who is the CTO of Moo. Moo, in case you haven't heard of them, are a company that make business cards. Doesn't sound very exciting, but they make them with a twist. You can choose pictures for the front of them from your Flickr or Bebo photos, they're a different size to your standard, run-of-the-mill business cards and they're made in such a way that they look incredibly cool. As soon as I saw some in the flesh I immediately wanted some! They're so cool you'll want to give them out to people at parties. Go check out the site, order some and then come back here to keep reading… Off you go! 

Stefan's a really interesting guy. He's been in the software game for years and is a bit of a start-up veteran. He's a proper techie and led us through the challenges of creating Moo along with some of his other past work (particularly UpMyStreet). He had some interesting stories about how Moo came to being, the pitfalls of working to someone else's API (such as Flickr's API - something I know all about with John's Background Switcher) and 3rd party libraries, the problems of getting popular FAST and a host of other things you'll likely come across if you start your own web app company. Very interesting stuff and I've already ordered my Moo cards and persuaded some friends to do the same - all it takes is to just show people and they consistently say "wow, I want some!".

I must take this opportunity to thank my good friend John Topley. Attending FOWA07 was his suggestion and he had the misfortune of being stuck with me for the whole 3 days! How he managed to cope with my dry wit and terrible sense of humour I'll never know! Fortunately he's a long-in-the-tooth cynic like me so we were on the same wavelength for most of the time and both cringed every time we heard buzzwords like "mashup".

John also introduced me to the exciting world of the Mac. There were far more Mac users there than PCs and playing around with Mac OS X for a while showed me just how much Vista's GUI is a copy. Really, pretty much every "innovation" is a straight copy from the Mac and when you see some of them in the context of the Mac they make a lot more sense than on Vista. And it's true what they say, out of the box the Mac really is full of creative-enabling software whereas the PC is all business and starchy shirt and tie. Those Mac vs. PC ads are right!

I'll definitely be going to the conference next year and you never know, by then I might have some exciting web app that'll change the world myself! All I need to do is think how I can bring background switching to the online world - or port it to the Mac where it'll be much more fun for starters…

Well, I’ve just spent the last 2 days attending the Future Of Web Apps listening to a lot of interesting people talk about their start-ups, their successful companies that came from start ups, venture capital funding, some of the movers and shakers in the California tech industry talking about moving and shaking and a sprinkling of other fascinating people from the likes of Yahoo!, Google and Amazon.

I must confess that I’m not really one of these people who pays much attention to hype and “the next big thing”. I know there’s a whole scene of bloggers who’re hyping lots of start ups, lots of cool web apps out there that “everybody’s using” and while a few years ago I’d have been right in there trying everything out and getting amazingly enthusiastic about everything for 5 minutes then moving on, I’m a bit long in the tooth nowadays and prefer to spend my time doing constructive things rather than jumping on bandwagons. I’ve heard of sites like Techcrunch and such but haven’t really paid any attention to them. Enter John The Cynic!

Having seen first hand what it’s like being in a company that goes from start-up to acquisition and the problems associated with growing from 6 people to 30 it was like a trip down memory lane listening to the stories of companies like Last.fm (which I’ll definitely be checking out - I was impressed by the calibre of the people, how they’ve done what they’ve done and what they’ve actually done). I was reminded of the hard work, the constantly changing direction, the mistakes made, the highs of getting it right and so on. Happy days!

What’s definitely different from when I went through all this is that web software (as opposed to the vision software in the electronics industry I worked in) has to have a community around it using the current (I hate to utter the words) “Web 2.0″ strategy of building interest and ultimately making money. What also struck me is that the some of the challenges are one hell of a lot less of a problem than what I worked on. If you want to try out a new feature on the people using your software, the time between idea and going live with it can be a matter of days, or even hours and the associated costs are much lower. Whereas in nasty old monolithic client software you can’t really get away with that and it ends up taking months before you can try something out (what with long release cycles you can’t just drop in things left right and centre). Plus the tools and technologies available today make realising your idea as a web app a technically far easier proposition than making your dreams a reality a few years ago in so far as your plumbing : creating ratio is much more weighted towards creating. These are good times to be a software developer!

Highlights for me included seeing Kevin Rose (the man behind Digg) talk about the development of Digg and some of the problems facing it. It’s hugely popular and having found myself on the front page of Digg last year I can only guess at how many people use the site. It’s an interesting problem growing a site to the point that it has 900,000 active users in the same place and they don’t all get along. Trying to manage the social aspect of a site like that is a tricky one and must be fun to work on!

Another highlight for me was Jonathan Rochelle from Google. He’s one of the men behind Google Docs and Spreadsheets and was one of the founders of the company acquired by Google that did the spreadsheets part. I’ve used Google Spreadsheets right from when it came out and even did a fair bit of wedding planning on it! Being able to have my good lady looking at it at work while I’m at my office doing the same, both making changes at the same time and chatting over the built in IM was very useful indeed.

But the best thing for me was seeing the man who invented PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf up on stage. Nobody who’s worked on web software over the last 10 years could fail to have come across PHP - it made developing web apps orders of magnitude easier than it was before and forms the cornerstone of LAMP - as used by a great many web start-up companies and BigCo’s besides. Yet for such an important person he was - as is often the case with very smart people - extremely humble and pragmatic. He was definitely from the old school and made a very interesting speaker.

What I found most peculiar - aside from people’s over-enthusiasm over announcements about things like OpenID (which for me like is swapping a bag of cats for a can of worms (that’s the long-in-the-tooth cynic in me kicking in again, sorry)) - was some of the people in the audience. Those who sat and blogged everything that was said in real-time did a very impressive job and I doubt my brain would have let me do that. However, there were loads of people sitting there playing games, emailing, looking at CVs and just generally doing anything but listen to the speakers. Makes me wonder why they (or their companies) have spent good money to send them to a conference where they’re not paying attention.

I always find it strange that people think they can listen, email, IM, play Risk and think all at the same time and be “super-productive” - “connected” as it were. It’s simply not possible - you end up doing a half-arsed job of all of the above. It’s a proven fact that merely talking on a mobile phone while driving massively reduces your ability to concentrate, and neither of those activities requires much brain power.

However, I’ve come away from the conference feeling positive and with a few ideas floating around my head that weren’t there before. Don’t expect any world-beating web applications to appear from me any time soon, but it’s certainly expanded my point of view and exposed me to a world I’d paid little attention to. The future of web apps for me has just started.

Well, this is an interesting turn of events. I'm sat on a train down to London on my way to the Future Of Web Apps conference. My friend John said a while ago that he was going to go and suggested I give it a look. Just perusing the list of people going and the subjects they were covering for 30 seconds was all I needed to start pestering my boss to let me go! That was a few months ago and suddenly it starts tomorrow.

I'm sure I'll meet lots of interesting people, listen to lots of interesting things, learn a hell of a lot, have a few ideas pop into my head and come back with my creative juices flowing at Maximum Homerdrive. I'm not going to do the Scoble thing of sitting in a conference blogging about what's going on as it happens. As anybody who's seen me cook knows, I struggle to poach eggs at the same time as making toast - so I'll stick to doing one thing at a time if you don't mind!

I've never been to anything like this before so I'm not entirely sure what to expect but I'll keep my mind and eyes open. Should be fun! I'll keep you posted…

I needed to scan something in to my computer and I realised as I switched my scanner on that my newly installed copy of Vista hadn't seen it yet. "No problem" I thought, it'll either find the drivers itself or I'll put the CD I got with it in.

It failed to find the drivers both on the web and on the CD. "Strange" I thought. I assumed it would be using some standard means of communicating with the computer (TWAIN) that Vista could easily handle. So I went to Epson's web site to get the latest driver and realised there weren't any for Vista (yet there were for some of their other scanners). It's not an ancient scanner, probably a couple of years old so I was surprised I couldn't get it to work.

After a reboot I was greeted with this friendly message:

Not very reassuring and in all the years I've been using Microsoft Windows, this is the first time a piece of hardware has failed to survive an update. May it rest in peace…

Of course, I also have a server running Windows 2003 lying around so I plugged it into that and the scanner worked as sweet as a nut. But it's interesting to see that underneath quite a lot clearly has changed in Vista and the days of Microsoft's legendary obsession with backwards compatibility may be starting to fade. Either that or Epson haven't updated their drivers yet and I'm just getting burned for being an early adopter!

Well, today, apart from being Tuesday, marks the day that Windows Vista is officially released to the world. It's been years in the making, delayed more times than I can remember, been slated left right and centre for having features cut and yet I'm sure it'll be a huge success.

I've been using it since the beta versions last year and while it's being released to the public today it has in fact been available for business and developers (like me) since November (if I remember correctly). Naturally I installed it on my work and home machines to try and live with it full time and see what it's like (I'm curious that way). So having been a constant Vista user for a few months I thought it was about time I wrote down my thoughts.

Firstly, I'm not going to use the words "revolutionary", "incredible" or "amazing" other than to say that it isn't any of those. It's just better.

The fancy graphics are indeed impressive, who wouldn't be impressed by a 3-D windows switcher like this?

The glass-like effect of the windows is very slick as are the animations. But after a while you don't even notice eye candy like that. I use my computer as a tool and so I'm not really that bothered how "nice" it looks, as long as it's easy on my eye. Which brings me to my first point. It really is easier on the eye. I get eye strain when I stare at a computer for too long and have to wear glasses. Since switching to Vista, I haven't needed to wear them once. I don't know what they've done, but the text on the screen doesn't strain my eyes any more!

Vista is like that. Compared to XP there are little improvements here and there that, on their own, don't really amount to much. Like touch-up tools on the picture viewer, or the address bar in explorer acting like buttons so you can go up the hierarchy much more easily than before, or the Start menu being more logically laid out. But together these things add up to a better experience - it just gets in your way less like all good software should.

It's undoubtedly more secure - I wrote before about how annoying User Account Control was, but I'm happier with it now. It doesn't get in the way once your machine is set up and it's reassuring that you're running as a restricted user so if some rogue software does take over your machine, it can't do any damage. Having said that, I haven't had a virus or Trojan on any computer for many many years.

It's also faster than Windows XP on the machines I use. My home desktop is an ageing dual P3 800MHz (which isn't exactly fast by today's standards) but Vista is noticeably snappier than XP was before it. My work machine is still as fast as always as is my laptop. It's not often that new operating system is quicker in this day and age.

I know that an enormous amount of work has gone into Vista and underneath some huge advances have been made. But to the average user none of that is likely to make a whole lot of difference. And that's the problem. If I had to go back to XP I could and while I might miss a thing or two about Vista, it wouldn't matter that much to me. Make me go from XP to Windows 98 or 2000 and I'd complain a lot more!

If I had to fork out the upgrade cost out of my own pocket, I'd find it really hard to do so. At the end of the day Vista is a better operating system than XP, but it's not really that much better on the surface and in day to day use. Trouble is though, Microsoft created a pretty good O/S in XP and to create a new one that seems as large a step forward as XP was is practically impossible.

That being said, I'm not about to go back to XP and it's very easy to sit and say I "could", but quite another to actually go through with it! It's definitely a big step forward although it's really a case of a huge number of tiny steps adding up to one big step. It's been oft said that people hate change, yet people seem to have been expecting some revolutionary changes with Vista (most likely the Microsoft PR machine causing that perception) that it's not living up to. However I think in reality people really want lots of small incremental changes that mean they know where they are, don't feel lost, but make their lives easier. And I think Vista has managed to do that well, as well as looking very pleasing to the eye.

Contrast that with the revolutionary Office 2007 that's also released today. It really is revolutionary since there are no toolbars or menus - everything has moved! When you start using it you really struggle to work out how to do anything at all. Your previous knowledge is rendered useless and you have to relearn everything from scratch. Sure, once you get there it's better than it was before, but the learning curve is a frustrating nightmare and a lot of people have moaned about it. I think Microsoft are damned if they do and damned if they don't at times!

Still, in many ways it's the dawn of a new era. Only time will tell if it's one for the better or the worse for Microsoft. If I were a betting man I'd say the former.