Dragon naturally speaking 10

Together with my copy of Sams Teach Yourself WPF in 24 Hours, I bought a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred.

I have set up two users one for my native language Dutch and another one for English.

So far I am very pleased with the results, actually I’m speaking to my computer right now so all this in my previous post are spoken rather than typed.

I haven’t used the system very much yet. It is amazingly flawless, albeit it does make a mistake here and there. I do believe that when you correct your errors it does learn from it. So I guess using it more often should improve the quality.

Actually the idea of starting to talk to the PC is something I’ve tried with Dragon NaturallySpeaking eight and I was not very impressed at that time. The new version however is way better than the previous.

I haven’t started to learn how I can send commands to my PC, but that should be doable to. One of the best things I find so far is that you never make grammar mistakes. It is always correct.

Been a while

Sure has been a while since my last post… So what have I been doing?

I’ve been doing a lot of consulting work for a Dutch company calles Qurius.

The end customer was BIS Industrial Services. They do insulation, scaffolding and a host of other services.

What I did for them was create a portal for their remote employees for registering time spent on projects. They register time for about 3000 employees. This is done by about 35 administrative employees.

The technology used was ASP.NET 2.0 on IIS6. The backend was Microsoft Dynamics Nav.

Where am I going?

I’m doing a small µISV project which has allready been sold for a company in Roeselare. They want a small program that allows them to register communication between the company and external contacts. They have been doing this for years an see real added value in this business process.

Until now, they have been registering their communications in an excell spreadsheet. This of course has some drawbacks in a multiuser environment. Another major drawback is that their contact details are in their Microsoft Dynamics Nav System.

Yes, that Nav again. I did design the app to allow for a pluggable dataaccess though, so it can easily be coupled to other software. The app is in C# ASP.NET and I’m probably not going to use the ajax control toolkit but rather Gaia Ajax Widgets.

I will probably post about my experiences with those in the next few days.

We’ve come a long way since 1984!

Today I was thinking a bit about where I’ve come from since my first computerdays. I was searching youtube for old demos and presentations and this is one I really liked. It is Steve Jobs giving a demo of Machintosh back in 1984.

Look at the crowd: they go nuts!

Software award scams exposed

We, as MicroISV’s, are forever in debt to Andy Brice. Andy is a MicroISV himself and the creator of PerfectTablePlan.

He did an experiment in submitting a fake piece of software to more that a thousand shareware sites and wrote an article about the results.

He got 16 awards already for his “awardmestars” software. This means that some of these sites are automated and hence render their awards useless…

While I always thought it was very strange that some crappy softwares are awarded, now we now for sure.

But there is also good news! over four hundred sites rejected the software. These are the good ones!

Andy submitted the software to so many sites trough a service I had never heard of before: SubmitEverywhere.com. They submit your software to some 1200 download sites for only $70. But not only that, it seems they will actually support the submission process as well! I will certainly give them a try when my new software is release ready.

Google Gears and the death of the desktop

I was reading up on how to make a webapp available offline. I want offline runnable webapps. The biggest argument I allways hear about webbased (business) apps is: “Yeah OK, but what if my internet connection fails?”

I’ve got a whole array of ready made answers to these questions but in the end, the best answer should be “No problem, it just keeps runnig, with a cached dataset, look”.

So a while ago I stumbled on Google Gears. This holds the promise of achieving just that. Among a lot of blogs on this, I came to this one: Google Gears Takes Web Apps Offline. Look at the comments.

So what’s wrong with GG? A lot I think, lemme explain. On this post, on another blog, I commented about the problems we traditionally had with desktop apps such as problems of deployment, cross platform compatibility and maintainability. Yes, you have to install a webbrowser extension (users often dont trust these anymore), you have to copy some files from a website (again: users often dont trust these anymore), and then run the app locally.

The next issue I have with this is that the entire app has to be written in Javascript. I felt like being thrown back in the stoneage (about 10 years ago in IT land).

I want apps that just run, without installing anything on the client side. I’m probably living in utopia…

I think the desktop is going to die, but not at the hand of Google Gears…

ERP solutions of the future

The advantage that ERP systems have is the centralisation of data and applications. When we go to new customers we see a lot of excell islands all over the company.

The disadvantage is often that for small companies they are not affordable. Especially when they want customisation, which is often why they want a certain erp system in the first place.

So how can we address this? How can we make it affordable for small companies to have a piece of custom software?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the Seoul Digital Forum amongst other things when asked to define web 3.0: “applications that are pieced together” and also ”very customizable”. (See the video on youtube)

With todays web 2.0 apps that all have interfaces and api’s, I believe he could be right! (think about freshbooks invoicing data that was written in Basecamp)

So, you make your pick from the web 2.0 apps out there (one or more) and provide the glue between them and maybe add some extra’s. Such services you could sell that to the customer. He ends up with an app that costs a fraction of the cost of a full fledged erp system, with the customisation benifits!

This could be the next wave for Web applications!

Custom Software differentiates you and your business

It is often debated whether to buy a standard package for your business administration or resort to custom software. In this post I explain my vision on this.

In today’s computer governed world, there is imho no business process that has not been implemented in software somewhere. If you google enough, I’m sure you will find something that could support your business. Maybe you will have to tweak your processes a bit but you should get a fit.

But wait a minute! SHOULD you tweak your business processes?

I vote NO!

What differentiates you and your business from all the other folks in your neck of the woods? They all sell apples, the same apples.

I believe it is how you sell your apples and how efficient your supporting business processes are. When it comes down to it, you do things just a little different to your neigbour. And you should! That’s what makes your business!

So, if you and fifty other applesellers use the same supporting software and hence business porcesses, your competitive advantage over them fades.

To resolve this, I say you should use a standard package and implement the things that separate you from the lot, in custom software.

Are Desktop Applications dead or not?

Antonio Cangiano blogged a response to a claim that Desktop Apps are dead: Desktop Applications are not dead!

This is going to spark a hot debate it seems.

Here’s my take on it: as a µISV, I don’t care much about the underlaying technology of my customers. Why? Because I’m never able to know who is going to buy my software and what environment they will run the app in. Also, because I have many small customers, instead of e few large ones, their technology choices are even more diverse.

So what do I do? I work with web based apps. This way, I only have to make sure that the software I make will run on one (virtual) machine, over which I have complete control.

The only thing I have to worry about, is the several browser flavors out there. But I find that it’s not that big an issue.

So how do you feel? Are Desktop Applications dead or not?

Company website

People say to me: “There’s nothing on your company website.”

No, there is not. And there will not be anything there until we can say something usefull.

I’m working a couple of apps (on which I will not say more yet) and other than that, I do consulting, subcontracting and custom solutions in Microsoft Dynamics Nav and ASP.NET 2.0. There is nothing more to say, so why fill the site with half truths?

No more Beta’s please

As Micheal Mcderment, founder of Freshbooks said in his post from more than a year ago: I’m tired of Beta.

I can agree with that. But I would even go further: not even a “New” tag or anything.

Why?

It all has to do with subconcious customer experience. Whenever I see something marked Beta, I get the feeling the developers are trying to say te me: “Hey don’t come nagging about this or that feature that is not there or not fully functional. We said it was Beta OK? Leave us alone allready!”

Of course this is not true, they just want to get early responses from customers. Totally fitting Agile methods.

So what can you do to have a better customer experience? Give it a release number and a roadmap. Maybe give them insigt in your product backlog.