January 2010 - Digital Tool Factory blog January 2010 - Digital Tool Factory blog

The Digital Tool Factory Blog

Thoughts on the Apple iPad and the Kindle

iPad
Creative Commons License photo credit: Rego – twitter.com/w3bdesign

First things first, I have not seen the Apple iPad.  I am an enthusiastic owner of an Amazon Kindle.  I honestly don’t see what the hype is about.  Granted, I never do with Apple products, but I can’t even see it from Apple’s point of view this time.  The Kindle is perfect at what it does, largely because it doesn’t do that much.  You read order, download, and read books on it.  Period.  The Kindle does that effortlessly and the e-ink is easier to read than paper.  The pages are consistently sized (an under-reported feature of the Kindle that helps quite a bit) and the battery lasts forever.  The Kindle also weighs almost nothing and you do not have to choose between it and a laptop in terms of weight or space.  In sum, the Kindle solves the problem of “I want to read something” quite well.

What problem does the iPad solve?  It will have the low battery life of anything with an actual monitor, so it can’t go that long without being charged, so add in the bulkiness of a charger 40% of the time to the transport of the unit.  It is harder to read (again, relative to the Kindle) so that’s another strike against it.

Perhaps I’m reading this wrong, maybe the competitor isn’t the Kindle, but rather some segment of the iPhone market.  Perhaps there is some segment of the world that is clamoring for multimedia computing power that is available while in motion.  But the obscurity of the Microsoft Tablet OS/PC indicates that there are not legions of people clamoring for walkable computing power.

Happily no one’s products depend on me, so good luck Apple.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Reviews / Sentiment— No comments
30
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

How to fix Print to PDF problem in QuickBooks 2010 – Version Two

The Problem: QuickBooks 2010 refuses to print to pdf when you attempt to send an invoice on Vista 64 bit.

The Cause: Quickbooks 2010 on Vista 64 bit does not work well.

The Solution: Close all programs, go to the Task Manager and make sure that Outlook is not open in the Processes.   Reopen QuickBooks Pro 2010 and try printing the invoice to pdf again.  I have no idea why this works, and I have yet to single out which program is causing QuickBooks to malfunction, but that does seem to fix it.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Accounting / How To Fix— No comments
30
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

Non-Disclosure Agreements are the Kiss of Death


nda
Creative Commons License photo credit: mil8

“Before I tell you about it you have to sign this!” is what they all say.  The idea will be written out over five pages, usually in the passive voice, with as many adjectives and adverbs as possible.  By the time you finish reading the document the concept will be fuzzier than when you started reading the document.

As a solo web/software I’ve signed 15 or so non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) over my past eight years in business for new products and companies.  I don’t recall any of the products being successful in the long term.  In fact, I can’t recall any of the products being around after six months.  Most of the products never reached any sort of development at all.  To a man the people pitching the NDAs had great enthusiasm, and  they all insisted on a great many meetings.  Why is this? Continue reading →

Biz / Sentiment / Software Development— No comments
29
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

New feature ideas for Stronico

I recently had these thoughts and I’m documenting them for version 2 of the Stronico application.

  1. Psychological profiling of contacts.  I’m thinking of a simple Type A, Type B snap judgment one can make after first meeting a person.  If I can think of working in the Myers-Briggs personality types that would be wonderful, but I don’t think the information is there to implement it practically.
  2. A matchmaker feature – if two contacts have similar tags, friends, interests, life statuses, locations etc, but are not known to know each other, it would be a great thing to introduce them (as written about in the great book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi.  I realize that Facebook has a similar feature, but this would make the decisions based on information that only you, the Stronico user would know.
  3. Archetyping – this is related to point 1, but it would be useful information to store impressions about someone, i.e. is that person a drama queen, unflappable robot (much like the author…), sports fanatic, sensitive artist, and the like.  These would not be that accurate, but it could come in handy, particularly for those people with large networks.  The use of broad archetyping is useful as a sorting mechanism.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Future Features / Stronico— No comments
28
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

How to fix binding problems with Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager

The Problem: You are trying to create a new website programatically via the Microsoft.Web.Administration.ServerManager and having no luck.  In fact, you are getting invalid binding errors at every turn. Continue reading →

How To Fix— No comments
25
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

How to fix the Microsoft.Web.Administration.dll problem

The Problem: While coding away on the Stronico signup process I came across a problem with creating a reference to the Microsoft.Web.Administration dll, namely it was not present as a reference.  No problem, I added the dll manually via Visual Studio (it is in the %WinDir%System32InetSrv directory), yet once that was done I could not reference the dll.

The Cause: The dll must be marked as “Copy Local – True” and “Specific Version – True”.

The Solution: Mark the two options as true in the properties and the problem will go away.  It’s always the stupid errors that cause the most problems.  One of the purposes of blogging these errors is to  reduce their frequency.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

How To Fix / Software Development— No comments
24
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

Garden of Eden Fallacy

From the upcoming e-book, Flying Car Syndrome

You may come across the view from clients that “Facebook is just like living in a small town”, or Twitter is “like overhearing people in a crowded subway car”.    These people are suffering from the Garden of Eden fallacy; which is thinking that some new technology is recreating something that existed in the past, only updated for the modern world.  In fact the the new technology and the old situation have little in common.  They might have a similar function, like keeping in touch for FaceBook, but the fallacy gets problematic when people inflict other attributes of the old situation onto the new technology.

Your corrections will go something like “Well, no.  What it actually does is…” will fall on deaf ears.  Basically the Garden of Eden fallacy is a way for people to talk about some new technology without thinking about the technology.  You cannot correct this fallacy without personally insulting the person.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Flying Car Syndrome - The Book— No comments
21
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

New server ordered

The path to beta proceeds, inexorably to completion.

We should hit our upcoming beta launch date.  We have a shiny new server being configured in the data center even as we speak.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Stronico— No comments
20
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

What is Stronico Contact Management?

Numerous readers have pointed out to me that I have not written a description of Stronico on this blog.  So, with no further ado…

Stronico is a web application that helps you remember who you know, and how you know them.  It connects the contact with the context.  I came up with the idea to solve one of my persistent problems; forgetting the names and faces of everyone I met.  The only good way I can remember people is to think of how I am connected to them.  Did I work with that person, were we neighbors?  Did that person work with my neighbor’s cousin’s roofing contractor?

Stronico helps with all of that.  What was the email address of that potential sales prospect you met at the conference two years ago that was a bad fit for your old product, but a great fit for your new one.  Just follow the contact chain to the conference and Stronico will tell you.  How many people do you know who play Golf, or have children?  Stronico will know.  And Stronico can show you visually, so you can follow the chain of contact, or “Six degrees of separation” from you to anyone else in your social network.   It increases your working memory by helping you group, cluster, and connect people with the context of knowing that person.  It’s a great tool for salespeople, or anyone else.

Check out our rough Demo here (don’t forget to check out both videos), and don’t forget to sign up for our mailing list on the right.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

Marketing / Stronico— No comments
19
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

How to fix the color shift in PhotoShop CS 4 Save for Web

The Problem: You have a lovely graphic, you save it for the web in the standard way, and the colors are way, way off.  Usually there is extra purple.  You scour the web and alter setting after setting in PhotoShop, all to no avail.

The Cause: It’s not Photoshop problem.  For whatever reason the default image previewer uses different color settings than Adobe Photoshop, and this results in a different looking image.

The Solution: Just ignore it.  The colors are only different in the preview, not in the final product.

 

This post originally appeared on the Stronico blog – with the absorption of Stronico into Digital Tool Factory this post has been moved to the Digital Tool Factory blog

How To Fix— No comments
15
Jan 10

Written By Steve French

 

← Older Entries



Copyright 2011 Digital Tool Factory. All Rights Reserved. Powered by raw technical talent. And in this case, WordPress.