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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Thu 29 May 2008 at 9:07
Engineers do not usually make good marketers, which can prove to be a challenge for small teams where people have to wear multiple caps in order to get a product released. I found a good blog from a friend, Gil Hildebrand, called Afterthought, that focuses on marketing a product from an engineer/programmer's perspective. It is certainly worth reading if you are interested in launching your own product of any type. Here are some of the good entries you might want to look at:
How Archimedes beat the work-life balance
Crafting an Elevator…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Wed 28 May 2008 at 11:28
- Comments
If you have ever been involved in the process of launching a piece of software to the public, then you know the difficulties and the costs of doing so. There is much more to do than just to launch your software to the world. First, let's just take a look at some of the basics of what you need to handle after launching an application (that do not involve programming):
Support (email, phone, helpdesk, etc.)
Licensing
Marketing
There is no way around support and marketing if you want a successful application, but luckily both can be …
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Thu 22 May 2008 at 23:27
- Comments
In my opinion, DRM has always been broken. Locking customers into a certain player or into a certain piece of software severely limits what they can do with the files they have legally bought (a disadvantage that illegally obtained tracks conveniently don't have). This is taken to a whole new level when the customer is denied access altogether to the tracks they have legally purchased.
MSN Music, which is now shut down, was used by a fair amount of people. The tracks that were purchased all came with Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM protection…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Mon 19 May 2008 at 21:34
- Comments
There is an immense amount of online group collaboration tools; so many that it becomes overwhelming trying to decide which one to use. On one hand, you have open-ended tools like wikis and email and on the other hand you have more sophisticated tools like Basecamp and Google Groups. At Lowter, we have tried a number of collaboration tools to facilitate communication amongst our four-person team. Most of them nobody used because they were simply too out of the way and too time consuming.
When it boils down to it, we have an extremely smal…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Fri 16 May 2008 at 6:10
In the first part in this series, I showed you Google Reader. This time around I'm going to show you another useful, simple online application: Instapaper. Instapaper is a way of saving a page that you want to read later. For example, if you are browsing a news website and see an article that you want to read, but simply don't have time to read it right then, you can save it to Instapaper and read it later. You don't have to worry about keeping tabs open or about saving pages to your bookmarks.
To add pages to Instapaper, you simply need…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Tue 13 May 2008 at 7:36
CSS image rollovers are common amongst web designers because they are easy to setup and they do not require mucking up the HTML. To change the background image on a rollover, one simply has to use the :hover pseudo-class on the target element, changing the background image when the element is hovered over. Note that in IE6 and in previous versions of IE, the :hover pseudo-class only works on anchor (<a>) elements. Anyhow, your code will look something like this:
div#banner {
background: url('canada.png');
height: 200px;
widt…
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- Author
- Matt Oakes
- Date
- Wed 7 May 2008 at 6:25
- Comments
In this series of blog posts, I'll be showing you useful little titbits that can really help you to improve how you use your time online. They will range from simple little tips to online applications that will all improve your productivity. For the first part in this series, I'm going to show you one of my favourite online applications: Google Reader.
One Internet technology that is beginning to take hold is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). It is simply a file (or feed) that gives updates about new content on a website. To view these RSS…
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- Author
- Ethan Poole
- Date
- Thu 1 May 2008 at 23:02
- Comments
I have always been one for radical redesigns of websites, instead of doing subtle, face-lifting redesigns. At times, radically redesigning a website from the ground up has its benefits, but, in actuality, a face-lift redesign can often prove to be much more effective. Sure, styles in web design change over time, as technology improves and the Internet cranks onwards. However, in reality, the general convention of a website does not really change over time; there are tried-and-true techniques for much of web design. Logos work best in the up…
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