Tools of the Trade

When at work, many of us are using Windows when are hearts might be elsewhere. As I wind down work with my current employer, I'm taking not of the tools I installed over the past 18 months which has significantly boosted my productivity. Here they are in no particular order.

Confluence

An enterprise wiki developed by a very switched on Australia company, company has been a great tool to share knowledge. Since we adopted it, I don't believe there has been a single file stored on the shared drive. Everything in Confluence is searchable, taggable and can be edited without opening Word.

Mingle

I've blogged about Mingle before, but its worth repeating: Mingle is a great tool. Its easy to use and does a very small amount of things reasonably well. Unfortunately, it was introduced into a team which wasn't very disciplined with project management (and our one project manager left several months ago) or time tracking so it didn't transform the way we work as much as I would have liked. However, if anything was going to work, Mingle was it.

ObjectDock Plus

ObjectDock is a Windows utility which mimics the dock on Mac OS X. Aside from the nice looks (it does suprisingly well, even with very low quality icons), it definitely increases your productivity. I have basically eliminated using the Start menu and can quickly open documents with specific applications just by dragging them to the dock. I use the Plus version and it money worth spending. I am able to move my system tray to the top of the screen (like the Mac menu bar) which makes a bigger difference than you would otherwise expect.

Google Chrome

The early adopter that I am, I quickly tried out Google Chrome when it was released. It turns out the speed is the killer browser feature. I've strayed to other browsers on occasion (Safari 4 Beta isn't bad) but I keep coming back to the Chrome. Lots of you out there rely on Firefox and her extensions. I hear you, but that's just not me.

Excel 2007

Nothing has improved my ability to analyse data more than Excel 2007. It seems to crash less than most Office applications, and the way it handles pivot tables is surely the way nature intended. The is extended to how it works with OLAP cubes; Excel is definitely my preferred OLAP client. For added value, impress your boss by using the data mining plug-in to do some incredibly useful tasks.

E

E is a text editor for Windows based on Textmate for Mac. I still prefer Textmate, but E comes close. I was never able to get the Cygwin integration working, but then again, I'm not as big a Unix geek as some. Still, e is a great lightweight text editor that gets out of your way, quickly opens files as text (even if they're not) and is always a right click away.

Jing

Jing is a very lightweight tool that allows you to quickly take screenshots or screencasts. It is free and has almost no features, but I wouldn't use anything else. It sits on the edge of your screen as a translucent sun, waiting for you to click it. When you do, you decide, image or movie, and off you go. You can't edit videos, but you can draw, highlight and annotate screenshots. Its always available, doesn't consume many resources and "just works". Combining Jing and Confluence can create a very simple but powerful platform to document your software systems and create how-to guides for your users.

This is an image taken using Jing that brings it all together: Chrome + Confluence + Jing + ObjectDock.

Reflections on Marketing Class: Using Apple as a Case Study in Marketing Channels

Today in my marketing class at Melbourne Business School, we examined distribution channels vis-à-vis marketing. Not surprising, we examined the distribution of music, tracing it from a technological standpoint (vinyl to MP3) and its channels (independent shops to iTunes).

The lecturer's main point with regards to Apple's success was the control over the hardware, software, and content of their "ecosystem" which allows them to control the channels of music distribution. While I don't disagree with Apple's dominant position, I take issue with some of comments and perceptions with regard to Apple's technology approach that were made in passing.

Primarily, the point was made that Apple is successful because their system is "closed", as compared with Microsoft that must struggle to handle software from a multitude of vendors. In fact, the underlying assumption, it seems, was that you simply could not develop any custom software for a Mac. Of course, this is simply not true.

Let me briefly explore the development options for both systems.

Unlike Windows where developers need to spend hundreds of dollars on software development products like Visual Studio, all Macs come bundled with X-Code, their development environment for building Mac software. One could argue that this alone makes it easier for a developer to create software for a Mac compared to a Windows PC.

Of course, it doesn't stop there. There was many who would argue that the Mac development environment is superior to Windows in other respects. The Cocoa framework seems to be a very elegant paradigm for developing applications, and Mac applications can often be created without writing any code. This doesn't mean anyone can create software for a Mac, but it does mean that more software can be created faster with fewer defects. (As an aside, Automator for Mac does mean that some tasks can be automated by someone without any development knowledge, and there simply isn't anything like it on Windows).

Steve Jobs understood the benefits of having a superior development environment (as well as other marketing principles such as segmentation, targeting and positioning) as demonstrated on this now-famous video from when he was at Next:

This philosophy was brought to Apple when they purchased Next, and brought Jobs back into the fold. Mac OS X is based on Next technology.

In class, it was also mentioned that the iPhone is Apple's first device which supports third-party applications. This, too, is not true (although it is the first iPod which can supports third-party applications). The Newton supported application development,although I don't know if it was a good environment or not.

Finally, Apple has success not just on Macs, but also on PCs with their iTunes software, showing they can success even when they don't control the hardware. Microsoft, too, has had success on Macs. Internet Explorer was highly regarded, and Office for Mac is sometimes regarded as superior to its Windows counterpart.

In summary, I'm making the point that Apple computers and devices are not closed systems; they do support software development, and provide a robust environment at that. Steve Jobs not doubt continues to realize the contribution that software developers make to the value proposition of a computing platform.

Snow Leopard: A Whole OS to Call Web Services?

I was just checking out the new Snow Leopard page [via TUAW] and it is quite defunct of anything remotely interesting. Sure, Exchange integration is great, but it only supports Exchange 2007. That's because Exchange 2007 supports standard web services (something that Microsoft should be applauded for doing). Now, I'm no OS X developer, but I suspect that incorporating, say, Exchange syncing of Address Book contacts is no more complex that adding the GMail Address Book sync included in the 10.5.3 update. Why a whole OS for this?

And why would I would I care in one year's time about an OS with a smaller hard drive footprint? I can buy a 1TB drive for around $200 these days. I have unlimited online backup via Mozy for $5 per month. I'm not sure how big Leopard is, but let's say its 10 GB. As a percentage of my primary hard drive, remote Airport disk and Mozy backup, that probably represents about 0.1% of my hard drive space. So if Apple manages to reduce the OS size to 1/10 of its current size, that will save me a staggering 0.09% percent of storage space.

And that's "in about a year" when hopefully laptop drives will be approaching 750GB, online storage will be as close to free as possible, and you'd just carry around your iPhone instead of your laptop for most media viewing activities.

So call me cynical, but I can't why anyone should get excited about a Snow Leopard or why I would consider paying for it.

iPhone: Apple should support Google Gears

A major criticism of the iPhone is the lack of an SDK, which prevents developers from writing custom applications. The only way for your application to run is via the mobile Safari web browser as a standard web application (HTML + Javascript). So this really raises the question: what do you want to do with an SDK that you can't already? This isn't strictly an iPhone issue, as we could try to develop a framework for all applications regardless of their target platform, i.e. when should one write a web-based application or write a so-called "desktop" application.

Under most circumstances, a web application is probably preferred because:

• there is no overhead in installing or updating the application


• data is stored remotely, so it's accessible regardless of where you are or which computer you are using


• it will run on multiple operating systems with little extra work

So what's missing? Naturally, there are a few things:

1. Access to other applications, either currently running or otherwise installed on the system


2. Using the application when no Internet connection is present, although I tend to agree that also think that this has diminishing returns


3. Security; individuals often think twice about storing private data on third-party servers

I'm probably in the Apple camp with regards to the first point. We don't want applications to interact with each other (or with the Phone OS itself) because this may have security implications for the owner and the network. I don't want to have an anti-virus running on my phone or iPod, to be sure. And I don't want to risk the possibility of my phone being hijacked to run some scams using my voice minutes. The risk is just too great.

So how can Apple help mitigate the second and third point without introducing a complex SDK? Easy! Apple should support the Google Gears on mobile Safari (and regular Safari, for that matter). With Adobe's support for Google Gears in AIR and Apple's adoption, we may see the Gears API become the de facto standard API for occasionally connected web applications.

Wouldn't that be nice?