I'm writing an application in my spare time that I hope to release soon, and I've been asking a few favours from friends to give me feedback. One such unfortunate soul is the internet's very own secretgeek. This is what my inbox looked like a few hours after sending Leon an email (on the week-end!!!) announcing my desire to get my application put through the wringer (with a little “fish-eye“ showing the type of feedback he adds to each image).

Now I'll be the first person to concede that my software isn't that great, but Leon takes feedback to the next level, hitting where it hurts* but leaving me walking away smiling because this is EXACTLY the kind of feedback I want to help me improve my application. This is the perfect antidote to “developer UI“, because after a while I've stop seeing the flaws, and stop feeling the clunkiness so keenly.

* Leon is immune from retaliation - not because his app timesnapper is so great [it is, sheesh why do you think Hanselman puts it in his ultimate tools list every-freakin'-year? because Leon's a NICE GUY???? ROFL], but for other reasons. It's the only software development shop where “cod” and “normal” aren't being used in this context.

It's hard to believe that in 2009 the disk properties dialog is still using two colours for its pie chart defined in 1981. Lets target the Midori release to replace this with a glassy 3-D pie chart that I can rotate and fly-through using the mouse. Please.

This year I co-presented with Dave Glover on “what's new in the windows7 UI and how can I take advantage of it”. The main takeaway from the session was that the Windows API CodePack makes leveraging all the new UI goodness in Windows 7 horribly easy, and as a result was a little “lighter-on“ as far as coding went compared to previous ones I've done. Demo-ing multi-touch is always fun (as everyone would have seen in the keynote). You can grab an updated slide deck here (with a few extra slides we had to leave on the cutting-room floor) plus the larger address-book demo (based on this code from codeplex) and the smaller .NET4 multi-touch demo (written from scratch by me the night before). Thanks to Dave for getting me on board as a co-presenter and to Tatham Oddie for his special guest appearance on search providers. If anyone has any feedback about the session or the demos I'd like to know how you thought it went.

Thinking about starting a small software company? Here's 5 links to help kick-start you:

• Secret Geek's 25 steps to starting a microISV
• Andy Brice on running a microISV
• Your product is free because you're lazy and scared Ian Landsman on why you shouldn't be afraid to ask for money
• Steve Pavlina on Amateurs vs. Professionals on the shareware scene
• Nick Bradbury on the joy of tech support and how it helps you connect with users.

The spirit of ted dzubia reached across space and time with an important message for me to share with the rest of the human race. If you're the kind of vacuous panty-waste who complains about a desktop application using 15 MB of memory then either go back to 1990 or kill yourself now.

I was reading a forum post recently where some asshat complained about a utility using 15 MB of memory. Now I'm no spring chicken - my first PC had 640 K of memory. I know you can squeeze a lot in to a few MB, and in some scenarios like on mobile and embedded devices 15 MB would be huge. But this was a windows desktop utility. In 2009 if an application using an extra 15 MB of system memory makes the slightest appreciable difference to you then you're either running on horribly old hardware, or you're using (or rather deluding yourself into thinking you're using) far too many applications at once. In either case this is YOUR problem, not a failing on the part of the application developer.

Former Telstra boss Sol Trujillo was in the news last week after a keynote where he claimed he “changed Australia”. I found this quite interesting, as only last week-end I heard a story from someone at a social gathering. She was being charged for a service which she claimed she had never asked for and was disputing the claim. After several interactions with Telstra's escalation process she was told somewhat forcefully that they would not be refunding her money because they had a call recording on a particular date where her husband had asked for this service to be started. She found this most interesting since on the date they had nominated her husband had been dead for several weeks. Later she was called back by another representative of Telstra, who appologized and said that the dispute resolution service was outsourced, and the outsourcer was financially goaled on having disputes settled in Telstra's favour. I'll leave it up to you to decide if Sol changed Australia for the better or not. 

A few years ago a friend of mine was working on a small to medium intranet project for a large customer. About 6 months in to this little gambit he heard about a poison pen email one of the architects had sent to several of the project stakeholders (many of them non-technical) criticizing their use of Flex for the UI of the app. He then provided a laundry list of reasons why he considered this a very bad technology choice.

1. His criticisms of Flex were mostly all technically wrong - like “Flex uses JDK 1.7, which isn't deployed to the SOE, and requires a direct connection to the mainframe at all times“
2. He had been one of the principal architects on the project from the get go and had had ample opportunity to set the technical direction
3. His means of distributing the criticism, as a scaremongering “we're doomed” rant to a non-technical audience without any “next steps” meant the team would be fighting fires for months to come
4. They weren't using Flex anyway

While I don't want to ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence, I can't help but wonder if we shouldn't consider adding a CompleteFuckingSociopath “bit” to go along with the Bozo “bit”.

50% CPU and steady and upabated memory growth, without even a hint of UI showing...And blu was the whole reason I started using twitter...

I saw this comment from Martin on Joel Spolsky's Business of Software forum, answering the question “How to appear bigger than you actually are as a microISV” and thought it was too funny not to re-post. Laughed until my eyes watered reading this list. Kudos to you, Martin.

Last week's QMSDNUG presentation on building a project kiosk in WPF/Silverlight (it was mostly in WPF, but almost all of what I showed translates to SL also) was recorded in live meeting (thanks Jorke). If you've ever wanted to watch a video of me coding for about an hour or so here's your chance! Here are the slides in PDF, and the “final” sample app (with face recognition!).

Microsoft with the help of and a few prominent community members have organized a WPF training day in a number of cities across Australia in the coming weeks. Paul Stovell and I will be conducting the Brisbane training and labs at Cliftons on Edward Street in the CBD on the 28th of March (a Saturday). The nominal $100 charitable donation will go to the Red Cross Victorian BushFire Appeal. Microsoft are providing pizza for lunch & Cliftons have also been kind enough to donate their training facilities at minimal cost. I'm hoping this will be a really great day, and the best part is that most of what you learn will translate directly to Silverlight too! We have only 40 slots so register your interest ASAP.

To register your interest email Paul: paul dot stovell at readify dot net
or myself: joseph at learnwpf dot com

We'll be trying to cover a lot of the core capabilties of WPF including...

1. Creating layouts, compositions and templates
2. Building custom controls
3. Working with Styles and control templates (includes using Expression Blend to restyle)
4. Using the Ribbon control to effortlessly create applications that are as familiar to your customers as Office 2007 (not to mention the Windows 7 Core Applications)
5. Working with the new DataGrid control to display tabular and editable data
6. Binding data with ease to your user interface
7. Anything else you want to know about...Bring along your questions - Paul can speak eloquently about any topic in WPF at will.

[Warning: This is not a technical post]

Dear Children's Book Authors

If you're writing a book in english and feel compelled to put an alphabet part in the book (maybe that is the WHOLE book) please please please for the love of god think about what word you choose for each letter. The english language is pretty messed up, so just choosing any word that starts with the letter in question just won't do. For example lets consider the letter E - unless you've got a pretty good reason not to I expect to see a picture of a fscking EGG when I open the 'E' page of the book. Eggs are a fairly distinctive colour and shape. Kids eat eggs (so long as they aren't alergic to them). Egg is a pretty easy word for a little kid to say. Don't use a word like Ewe (a female sheep) or Eye (unless you want me to come around to your house and poke one of them out). While these are both good short words and are somewhat easy to say they are atypical of the sound made by the letter E when beginning a word, instead sounding like the letters U or I respectively.

Ewe is particularly bad because it commits the second fairly flagrant sin - using a specific word for a more general concept. If you've bought the rights to a nice picture of a ewe and want to use it in your book throw it in as S for sheep not E for ewe, OK? Since a ewe is still a kind of sheep you're still correct, just being less precise (something you were clearly happy enough to do when you dropped off the species, location, age, lineage and DNA sequence of this particular specimen and compromised at ewe).The worst offender I can recall seeing in this area is a picture of a sheepdog under S. WTF. Do you want my kids to have learning difficulties? Kids will be wondering - it looks like a dog, but the name has sheep in it too. I know what sheep are, but that doesn't look like a sheep. Could it be both? What other animals can you mix together? Goodbye learning the alphabet and hello Chimeras. Just don't do this.

Thankyou and good-day

When people hear you can write computer programs they sometimes (in the mistaken belief that computers can somehow defy the laws of time, space, mathematics or reason) ask you to write the strangest things. The most infeasible thing I have ever been asked to write was in a taxi ride home. The cab driver said he already had a computer program that could pick 6 out of the 7 lottery numbers in each week's lottery, but that he needed a program that could pick all 7. Could I write something like this for him? Using my most soothing consulting voice I calmly told him that writing such a program would be “quite difficult” (in the same way that factoring prime numbers is quite difficult) and that he should instead repeatedly win the smaller prize pool with the 6 numbers his current program gave him. All the while I tried to retain a pleasant smile while my inner voice screamed out “you've being driven home by someone who is completely in-freaking-sane!!!!1! jump out of the car now!”.

Sadly this penchant for people to ask for infeasible programs is not limited to casual acquaintances and sometimes manifests itself in those who should know better, the so-called “business representatives” or “business analysts”. I heard about an incident where, during a meeting someone asked if the specialized CRM system could record a specific type of entry for pregnant women “even if the woman doesn’t know she is pregnant”. Should the entry be recorded at the moment of conception then, or when the act of procreation takes place? It would take a team of crack-smoking BAs WEEKS to figure out the “most correct” way for that to happen, but why mess around – why don’t we just pre-create all the entries for all the people (living now, or as-yet unborn) that will fall pregnant during the lifetime of the system. Computer programs can do some pretty amazing things - they can learn to play checkers, they can come up with antenna design that humans would be hard-pressed to, but there are limits.  What is the  most infeasible piece of software you've ever been asked to write?

I tend to live in a bit of a Microsoft bubble and often wonder how people outside the bubble percieve Microsoft's offerings. I was pleased when I saw this post from design shop Effective UI describing their impressions of surface.

I think the Surface has huge potential! Imagine hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, dentist offices, doctors, etc. Any place people are sitting with time to kill, the Surface could really make a big impact on the customer experience....Microsoft hasn’t always led the fold in UX, but Surface really is a very cool step in the right direction.

Judging from the content on their blog, these are pretty serious Flash/Adobe designer/developers. I got their via Peter Blois' blog, where he ported some control themes he found on one of the Effective UI guys blogs from Flex to Silverlight 2. Nice work Peter (oh, and I'm still a big fan of Snoop).

I was just looking at the Vertigo Obama Newspaper cover deepzoom page and noticed all (bar one) of the Australian news papers didn't feature the Obama victory on the front cover, they instead featured (mostly) details about a particular horse race. Does this mean Australians don't care about what's going on outside their own borders? Nah - it's just that these are all the Wednesday newspapers....printed early some time on Wednesday morning or late Tuesday night. The election wasn't really called until Wednesday afternoon here. The only paper that does feature Obama on the cover is MX, the freebie paper you get when you're getting on the train, and which usually features celebrity gossip and the like. It is an afternoon paper. I was glad to see a number of non-Australian newspapers running stories unrelated to the US elections on the cover - such as football. Perhaps they also suffer from the terrible problem of not being in the same timezone as the continental united states.