This is just plain silly. If you haven’t tried google maps on your mobile device lately, just try it. It knows where you are without using gps. Very slick.

Just saw this after the fact on LifeHacker, they explain how google’s doing it.

All I can say is that if someone starts doctoring like this in my area I’d try it in a heartbeat. He’s a doctor in NY who’s combining old school house calls with new technologies such as email and IM to create something truly unique.

Ricardo Covo came out to DemoCampGuelph3 and demo’d one of the facebook applications he’s built called Network Trotters.

The interesting part for me is that he’s building facebook applications in .NET. Personally I have zero interest in actually using facebook apps. I am, however, curious about facebook applications from a development perspective so I’d love to see Ricardo come out again sometime and show some code. As well, what are the dirty details involved in building and deploying these applications?

If you missed DemoCampGuelph3, sign up for the google group and join us next time.

“Without appropriate design, yesterday’s success is tomorrow’s straightjacket, since today’s great applications are tomorrow’s legacy systems.”, Buxton.

We’ve all worked on projects with ‘crappy code’. How do they get like that since none of us writes crappy code? The more successful a project is, the longer you have to survive with that codebase. We never have to live with codebases on unsuccessful projects. They disappear into the abyss. So it’s a waste of time to properly design a project that won’t be successful and it’s extremely detrimental to a successful project to poorly design it.

So does that mean a project’s design time should be relative to how successful you intend the project to be?

According to Guy Kawasaki, me and all my friends are better suited to be the next big thing than that wildly successful guy.

“Guys under thirty who are building a product that they themselves want to use.”

Ok maybe I blew the age requirement but at least I’m not wildly successful.

Joel explains why Human Task Switches Considered Harmful.

I could have sworn I posted this but wasn’t able to find it when searching so here it is for possibly the first time.

“It is better to have your preliminary work critiqued by your colleagues while there is still time to do something about it - no matter how difficult the criticism might be - than to have the finished project torn apart by strangers in public.”, Bill Buxton

Once again I’m messing around with the language that won’t go away. If you haven’t read these in regards to python, have a peek.

• Eric Raymond explains Why Python?
• The zen of python.

I’m not sure Alan Cooper created the concept of personas, however, he certainly contributed heavily. I’m a fan of Alan’s work and I’ve always liked personas.

Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals, comments on personas:

“Personas can’t make mistakes. Personas can’t make value judgements. Personas don’t use products. Personas aren’t real.”

Tough to argue with, however, isn’t working with personas a lot better than nothing at all? Following along, isn’t working with real users a lot better than personas?

According the site, John Reel is a “Renegade Super-Programmer”. I can’t confirm or deny that or any of the other claims on their site. What I do know is that he and his partner demo’d at the recent DemoCampGuelph3.

They demo’d an application they’d written to handle the installation of a php, server based web application that they sell. Nothing too exciting except for one key difference. They claim to have sold over 1500 copies of that software in less than a week. That’s a lot of different environments to install on.

If you’ve ever installed a php, web app then you know you typically ftp a zip to the server. Unzip/tar the files in a location. Play with permissions, add a database, set more permissions, etc, etc. The good apps have useful config pages which clearly explain to you at any stage in the process what’s wrong and what you can do to remedy the situation.

What John did was much cooler. They took it all out of your hands. Of course that requires you provide them with some serious credentials and full access to your server, however, you have the option of doing it all yourself if you prefer.

How could you possibly test and support the infinite number of server configurations out there? You don’t. In their case they tested 50 setups. Then they staffed a team of 7 developers around the clock to monitor client installations. When a client ran into issues, those developers fixed the issue for them. They then used the lessons gained to make the software better.

I like it because it’s a non-technical solution to a technical problem. Software companies can easily lose site of the available non-techie solutions available to them.

If you missed DemoCampGuelph3, sign up for the google group and join us next time.