Trialware timeout idea

Trialware is a great idea. You download an application and use it for a set period of time and at the end it becomes crippled or won't run at all. The trend seems to be to make the trial period calander based, that is you have a set period of time to use it from the date you first installed it (or in some cased first open it).

With my newfound User eXperience hat on, I have a much better idea. Let's make the trial time a bit shorter, but have the trial actually track the usage. How many times have you installed a trial then not looked at it for another couple of weeks, and then a month goes past and you try it again to find it has expired. Has the user had enough time to get a feel of the program? I know when this happens to me I usually don't bother buying the program because I don't know if it is for me. Why should the user spend the time to get to know the program on the program's terms? Wouldn't it be a much better experience if the program said "how much time do you want to try this out?" Let the user choose if they want one or two weeks to try it out, and then only count the days that they actually USE the program! Makes them feel like they are in control and they can try it out when they have the time (everyone are very busy people, give them some flexibility!)

Sure you can make the trial time shorter. 30 days is a long time if it is spread out over a year... Make it 10 days. My bet is you will get more people buying the program because they got time to use it. I don't want people paying for something they don't really need, especially if it is something I have provided. I want my users to WANT to pay for it because they think it's awesome, not fool them into buying something they dont really need or want. Knock your socks off service. What a concept. Give me some of that!

Off you go, implement my brilliant idea and give me credit. Let me know how it works out. :)

Stuff I couldn't live without...

Ok, I've been pinged by one of those viral like list things. Thanks Mike! :)

Let's see now... It's a fairly short list I think. I don't like to spread myself too thin. HA! Yeah right.

1. My Brother. He's been there in my life for as long as I can remember. People say we look alike, sound alike and act alike. We are like ying and yang. The world is not complete without us both in it. Makes me laugh so hard I practically wet myself. :)
2. Computers. It's what I do. I play with computers, work with computers, found my wife on computers, left my first wife via computers... In the last 20 years I can actually remember the few times i've not been near one and it was horrible. They are my life.
3. The Internet. See number 1. I have the Internet at home, at work, and in my pocket on my phone. I can imagine a life that is not connected and it scares the shit outta me. I choose online.
4. People. Friends, family and strangers. I like being around people. It's one thing I love about the Internet is that it lets you socialise. Solitary confinement would make me a crazy person.

I discovered while moving house recently that I had a LOT of crap, some very sentimental, hoarded away in the garage. We filled a miniskip bin that I could have fit my car in with a lot of that crap. Some of it, I had forgotten I owned. Lots of books I'd never read again. It's gone and if you asked me to list what I threw out, I wouldn't be able to tell you. good riddence!

I do like my gadets and toys though... That would probably be my number 5 on my list.

oh what? I'm sposed to tag 5 friends? right.. um... ok... not sure if they have been tagged already, i'm a bit behind on my blog reading.

Doug Paice
Alastair Waddell
Mitch Wheat
Nick Randolph
Simon Price - My brother. :)

WPF Adventures

Well It's been a while since I've blogged. I've been twittering heaps, and messing about in Facebook. I thought it was time I did a blog entry about what I've been upto lately.

I've just started a new job this week and my official title is User Interface Developer. I'm still settling in and my responsibilities essentially lie in the UI development of a smart app. So far, I'm loving it. I'm learning things about UI that I didn't realise I had an interest in, and somehow have built up a pretty good background in UI design without even realising it.

The most exciting part is that I'll be researching a range of various UI components using WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), something I've wanted to spend more time on but have been so busy working that I've not had time. Now it's actually my job, so I'm stoked.

Some things I plan to investigate more;
Fancy UI that still has a corporate feel to it
Mapping display of data. similar to Grokker, Kartoo, Digg etc.
Styles and templates (Themes, skinning)

Still pinching myself... Awesome job!

Australian Web Industry Association » BarCamp Perth

Australian Web Industry Association » BarCamp Perth

I just found out via one of the other Perth bloggers (Thanks waxlyrical) about BarCamp Perth. I was like... hmm... whats that? Followed the links and did some reading and decided I'm GOING TO THAT!

Sounds great, really awesome format, open learning and collaboration, workshops etc. Sounds like anything goes, its driven by the participants. Maybe I can contribute some of what I picked up at ReMix07.

So I'll be there. Looks like some Silverlight is on the cards, as well as other Web technologies. Some Ruby on Rails... Only just found out in time, it's on tomorrow!

Stephen Price, a WACOM Tablet and Popfly

Stephen Price, a WACOM Tablet and Popfly: nickhodge.com mungenet

Hehe, Nick tells a good story.

I've started drawing cartoons of various IT celebrities, my first being Joel Pobar and Nick Hodge my second. I think I'll follow this and see where it goes. I've got one in mind for Dr Neil, and one for Hugo Ortega.

Watch this space. :)

Team APA Finalists

Team APA Finalists
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Team APA from University of Canberra were the finalists for the Imagine Cup 2007. Here is a photo I took of them receiving their boarding pass for their trip to Korea in a couple of months.

Congratulations guys!

Imagine Cup 2007

Imagine Cup 2007
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

The Imagine Cup is being run at the moment in Melbourne. Students enter the competition and are judged by



I stood in on one of the demos where the software was written to help teach visually impared people C#. A noble cause indeed, and a good launguage to learn. :)

They called their app Audio Studio.Net which is a good pun on the name Visual studio.



For more info about the Imagine Cup competition check out http://www.microsoft.com.au/imaginecup

Update: The entry I saw ended up being the winning entry for Australia and they get to go on to Korea to compete there! Their team name is Team APA and they are from Canberra (University of Canberra), which is my home town, so way to go fellow Canberrians! :)

Web development

Web development
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

John-Daniel Trask did a great presentation on web development. Covered a tool I have not seen before that is awesome for testing web sites. It's called WatiN. You record your actions and it creates the C# code to automate the script which you can then use in your unit tests.

He ased how many people knew about continuous integration and unit testing and only 20% of the audience knew about it. Lower than I expected.



He used a bit of code and showed some unit tests and mentioned NUnit as well as TestDriven.Net. The code was C#... ;)



Great tips on web development. Weight of pages is important even when broadband connections are available. A major web site in new zealand demonstrated that trimming the weight has users stay on the site longer meaning more page views.



Showed off Control adapters for menus (think there was some other control types too) which are free controls available on the net.

WPF overview

WPF overview
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Joeseph gave an overview of some of the cool new things in WPF. Content within content for example you can put a button within a button within a button. He showed off styles which looks really powerful. It's XAML version of CSS, so now you can change your sytle in one place and it will flow through your whole app much like CSS does with HTML.



A good session. I've seen joeseph speak before (at code camp) and each time I come away with something new.

The Morning After...

Here I am sitting in my room, of the second day and my head hurts. Yesterday was an awesome day! I kind of stopped blogging as I was trying to do it via my phone which was a bit too fiddly and I wasn't concentrating on what was being said. The pace picked up and the content was great.
Afterwards most people went to the WebJam (3 minute demos over beer) at Galactic Circuis. Lots of beer, video games and bowling. Was a great night.

Oh, if you are ever in Melbourne and want a really cheap place to stay then I recommend Urban Central (if you don't mind backpackers). The rooms are nice, four per room with an ensuite in each room, and free breakfast. Can't knock that for $28 a night!

Oh, I also won one of the WACOM bamboo tablets so a big thanks to WACOM, that should replace my cheap tablet at home and make a cartoonist happy!

I'll do a couple more posts today...

Classic T-Shirt

Classic T-Shirt
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Had to blog Frank's latest shirt :)

Rich web apps with silverlight

Rich web apps with silverlight
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Laurence Moroney covers silverlight.



Really low level and fast... Great content.



Seemed to be showing lots of java script examples. Would prefer .net but it's ok to get the idea across.

WPF with Lee Brimelow

WPF with Lee Brimelow
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Lee has lots of experience with wpf and is a good speaker as well as funny.



Went into some tips about prototyping.

Tools he uses... Photoshop c3, expression blend, VS 2005 and ZAM 3D. (I demo'd that at the perth .net user group)



Showed some of his prototypes as he went through the learning curve of wpf. Mentioned flickr.net a .net library for interfacing with flickr.



Fake 3D carousel... Don't bother with real 3d if you can get away with it.



Lee recommended stealing ideas and code samples from flash as the wpf resources are still new days.



Was impressed with the performance of wpf, one demo showed hundreds of letters and it was still smooth.



Flickrcube prototype was cool... Check that out.

Phidgets is another cool thing, physical sliders and knobs that you can interface with wpf.



Thewpfblog.com is Lee's blog. He's going to post the code and slides. Must say wpf is realy impressive in the right hands.



Hope the above doesn't come across too random.

Remix UX

Remix UX
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Shane Morris spoke a bit during the keynote about the expression products and did a quick demo of the four products. He even did some code (and he claims to be a designer!)



Brian did the keynote which covered pretty much what their aim was with WPF and silverlight, as well as a high level view of what silverlight means for developers.



Nicolas did a demo of the Discovery channel web site using silverlight. Dev time was two weeks and it goes live in august

Lol he showed a video of an ex sas reporter eating a zebra...

Some plans for the site include msn im integration and maybe even twitter.



Brian mentioned a free silverlight streaming service for developers.



Yawning a bit here. Hope I can stay awake... Also apoligies if



Lucas sherwood spoke about the design of the orlando web site which is using silverlight. No designing done by developers they just stitched together the designers work.



Haha brian showed a chest silverlight using java vs .net and .net kept winning due to its superior performance.



Showed Top bananas a silverlight video editing tool.

Spoke about dynamic languages with .net



Whew... For a key note a lot was covered. Should be a great couple of days. Will try to keep the posts coming!

Remix Melbourne

Remix Melbourne
Originally uploaded by Lyynx.

Well here I am in freezing Melbourne standing at registration. Had a quick chat with Nick Hodge and am looking out for anyone I met at code camp. Lots of people here but no familiar faces yet.

Oh I said hi to Dr Neil...

Will blog about each session (i'll be in the dev track)

New Business card

Two posts in one day!

Yesterday I got my new business cards. I got them from a site called http://www.cmykcards.com.au/ and they look great!

I designed my own card, being a cartoonist in my spare time, and their site lets you download a template. You then upload the template when you place your order. I got 1000 cards for $99. Ordered them on the 12th and got them on the 20th so 8 days. Thats half the time I was quoted in a printing shop in Perth, and about $150 cheaper for twice the number of cards!!

I've only been meaning to design my business card for the last 5 years... The design finally popped into my head and I think it was worth the wait. :)

Tabbed Debugging

I just noticed a surprising thing with tabbed browsing and Visual Studio (2003 in this case). If you run a web project in debug mode it opens your default web page and when you close the web page the debugging session stops as you would expect. But if you open new tabs on your browser (talking IE7.0 here of course) and then close the tab with your web app in it, leaving the other tabs open (could be any pages here at all... Google, Microsoft.com, whatever) then the debug session stays running.
So I tried this again only this time clicked the "Stop debugging" button in Visual Studio and the whole browser closed. All of the tabs I had open, along with the page being debugged closed without the normal "Do you wish to close all tabs?" prompt. No sign of it. Nothing. No warning...

I was expecting to see either the prompt, or the debugging to be linked up to the tab, not the browser. I can understand why it happens so I guess the prompt would make more sense. I guess the "stop" button means stop NOW, not exit what you are doing.

The Singularity Is Near

The Singularity Is Near - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Does this spell the beginning or the end? It certainly seems like its a case of when will this happen, not will it happen.

If the human brain can exist then surely it can be reproduced artificially. Computers of the future may actually be grown, not built. If there is a biological component to an artificial life form and it becomes self aware then should it have rights?
Recently, I read that they had introduced human genes into rats and sheep so that they can have a more human like model to perform medial research upon, but does this not mean the animals are part humans? At what point do they have rights?

The future seems to be filled with peril. one slip up and our fragile existence could be snuffed out in an eyeblink. Watch this space...

PopFly

Microsoft have a new project which looks fun. http://www.popfly.com. If you have seen the Yahoo effort called Pipelines http://pipes.yahoo.com/ then this may well be Microsoft's version of the same. I'm not sure yet but basically it will allow people to connect together various web services and create their own applications.

Anyway, the name they chose inspired a new Aphobia cartoon so here it is...

IEBlog : Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar - Get it Now!

IEBlog : Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar - Get it Now!

Every now and then a tool comes along that stops you in your tracks. You wonder how you ever got by without it. I've just discovered this IE add in that I think will be invaluable if you are a Web developer!!

It basically gives you a whole load of information about the current web page, stuff like div tags and tables, properties etc. The amount of time I've spent trolling through the "View Source" page trying to figure out how a certain effect has been achieved makes this tool a winner.

I've only just installed it but it looks great! check it out and let me know what you think.