http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:52:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en One of the things I do is look at competitive products. I do this both to understand their strengths and weaknesses as well as our own. Looking at someone else's solution to a similar problem can often give you a fresh perspective. As I looked at several of these, a few ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/opposition-research.html As a Macintosh user it’s easy to feel left out by cross platform application vendors. Microsoft is too easy a target (though I can't miss the chance to say I use Entourage every day and it never ceases to make me angry), so I’ll pick on someone my own size. ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/isaac-and-ishmael.html Like everyone else, the state of the economy is something I watch. And lately its felt like watching a slow motion car crash. I can’t look away and yet I can’t really do anything either. Some days I feel like I’m watching from the curb, and other days I’m strapped ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/what-kind-of-day-has-it-been.html I’d like to draw your attention to an area of Seapine’s web site you may not be aware of. Seapine has a lab site at http://labs.seapine.com, where we post things that aren’t supported yet but might make your life easier. The Surround area has some nice tips and discussions about ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/life-on-mars.html Security in an application is one of those things that rarely gets discussed in a demo. Most people say “we have excellent security control” and then move on to some alluring graphical drag and drop functionality. But security is something that lots of applications get wrong, for lots of different reasons. ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/enemies-foreign-and-domestic.html It’s not unusual for someone to suggest a feature which, in fact, we already have. It’s not even all that unusual for that person to be using the version of the software that has that feature. So I thought I would take a few minutes to point out some features ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/slow-news-day.html One thing I think about is release frequency. How often should we release new, non-maintenance releases of our software? As often as possible? Bi-annually? Yearly? On the one hand, I like to give user continual improvements. When people come up with great suggestions, especially when they are straightforward, you want to ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/evidence-of-things-not-seen.html Conversion can be a tricky business. No one wants to convert from one thing to another. It assumes you were wrong in some way. And you know it’s going to be hard. And what if the new thing isn’t really any better than the old thing? Then all that work ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/a-change-is-gonna-come.html One of the challenges with any product is how to handle “bad” feature requests. Not every user idea is a diamond in the rough. Sometimes it’s as simple as being very specific to that company/department/users use of the product. Sometimes what they want is counter to what the product is ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/the-short-list.html We’re investigating adding an annotate/blame feature in Surround SCM. If your not familiar with this concept, it allows you to mark every line in a file with the date, version and person who last changed it. For example, if the current version of your file looks something like this int bar; bar=7; bar++; if ... http://blogs.seapine.com/jeff/post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc.html