Sponsor: The JavaScript Anthology
The JavaScript Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks (external link)
Browse Blog Archives
« April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 »
Blog Entries from May 2008
-
Afterthought Blog: Marketing for Engineers
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 (external link), 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:
-
Advantages to Giving Software Away for Free
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 done on the cheap side. There are plenty of free support desk applications to manage support inquiries and there are cheap methods to market your application. However, licensing and protecting your product can be expensive. If you want to make sure that your application is not copied and redistributed (so you can maximise on profit directly from selling the application), then you have to purchase licensing and encryption software, which can take a large chunk out of your wallet. However, if you have a quality application that people actually want, then the licensing software may quickly pay for itself.
But how about if you could avoid the licensing start-up costs and still make money off of your application? "Protecting" your application is an ongoing process that can be time-consuming and expensive. What about if you gave away your application for free? You could make money off of the traffic your application brings to your website. Also, you could use the increased traffic to launch another license-protected application in the future, with the additional funds gained from advertising and from support plans. However, the big advantage is not having to spend the money on licensing and encrypting software in the start-up process, so the money can be diverged into marketing or into support. Also, if you are low on funds to launch the application, it significantly reduces the launch costs if you release it for free.
Essentially, at Lowter, we released Ottoman with minimal costs because we released it under an open source license and for free. Lowter got more traffic, which led to increased advertising revenue. Plus, we did not have to deal with the stress of people essentially stealing our application against our software license. It really did not matter how people obtained it, but just that they visited our website after for resources and for help with using the application. Granted, the traffic from Ottoman has largely died down, but it still provided a substantial traffic increase when the project was active.
Basically, when releasing an application, consider offering it for free, or even just offering a free version to bring in more customers. You can still make money indirectly and a strong traffic base is indispensable for launching new products in the future.
-
Why DRM is Broken
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. The store was shut down after the launch of the Zune and was replaced by the Zune Marketplace. The tracks that were purchased on MSN Music were still playable; however, this is about to change.
The way MSN Music's DRM works is that when the track is played, the software will check with an authentication server to see if the track is legal. If it is legal, then the track plays. If not, then it doesn't play. Also, if this server cannot be reached then the track will not play. Microsoft has recently announced that they will be shutting down the authentication servers for MSN Music (external link), which means that music purchased through this website will no longer play, unless it has already been authenticated!
This to me exemplifies exactly why DRM was never a good idea. It shows how these users have never actually purchased their music, only leased it until the seller shuts down.
-
Small Scale Online Group Collaboration
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 (external link) and Google Groups (external link). 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 small management team and most of the grunt work is done by myself. Generally, we only collaborate on feature ideas and publications, so pretty tools like Basecamp have simply too many bells and whistles for us. Intranet-style systems were never actually visited by anyone, so we needed to settle on communication methods right at our fingertips that we each already used often. We ended up using a forum located right on our own forums at Lowter.com, in addition to email and to MSN.
Now, there was no collaboration about which communication mediums to use. It was simply a natural progression until we found something that just seemed to work. However, it is easy enough to skip all the fuss and go right to what works, unlike what we did. If you have a small team, it really is not necessary to dive into the hundreds of applications for group communication. Just use what you already use for communication: email, IM, etc. To archive and to organise your emails amongst each other, you can create a mailing list through Google Groups. Forums are also nice to keep conversation organised, and if your website already has a forum it makes it convenient too.
In the end, for online group collaboration sometimes the best means of communication are right in front of you. Unless you are managing something major with lots of people, a software solution is not always necessary.
-
Improving Your Online Productivity: Instapaper [2]
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 (external link). 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 to add a little button to your toolbar by dragging it from the website and onto your toolbar. When you click on this button, a window will pop up saying that the page has been saved and then it will close itself. Fast and effective.
When a page is saved, it is added to your Instapaper page, which gives you two lists: Unread and Recently Read. Very simple and easy to understand. Once you click on an unread page, you are redirected to the page you saved and the page is moved to your Recently Read list.
I love this website for its simplicity and for the speed at which you can add pages to your list. It's a bit like del.icio.us, but without all the social parts - which I don't personally want nor need - and a lot simpler.
-
CSS Image Rollovers with One Image
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:
CSS
div#banner {
background: url('canada.png');
height: 200px;
width: 400px;
}
div#banner:hover {
background: url('manitoba.png');
}And output something like this:
Overall, a generic CSS image rollover is a breeze. However, one issue can arise with using two separate images, one for the initial state (external link) and one for the rollover state (external link): a delay in loading the rollover image. There is a small delay in loading the rollover image because it is not pre-loaded by the browser before the user hovers over the element. Rather, the image is loaded when the :hover state is activated for the element. Now, the image can be pre-loaded using a number of methods, including JavaScript, but it is much easier to achieve using CSS itself.
CSS offers the nifty ability not only to control the background image of an element, but to control that image's position within the element (external link) as well. So, rather than changing the background element on a rollover, one can just change the position of the current background image instead. By combining the two different background images into one image file (external link) and then changing the position of that image based on the element's state, the small delay is entirely avoided. The styling is not very complex either:
CSS
div#banner {
background: url('canada_manitoba.png');
height: 200px;
width: 400px;
}
div#banner:hover {
background-position: 0px -200px;
}And the output is exactly the same, but without the delay! Make sure to set the proper position for that specific element and to that specific image. See, using one image for CSS rollovers is pretty easy and it avoids that inconvenient loading delay.
-
Improving Your Online Productivity: Google Reader [1]
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 (external link).
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 feeds you need an RSS reader. There are many different readers available, both online and for your desktop. Both have their advantages, but I prefer an online application, so that I can access my feeds from any computer using my Google account.
First, create a Google Reader account, which may require you to create a Google account if you don't yet have one. Then, to begin, you need to add some RSS feeds to your list. You can do this by clicking "Add Subscription" and then entering the URI of the website to which you want to subscribe. It's that easy! Then you have that feed on your reading list, which is arranged sort of like an email inbox.
One of the interesting features is the ability to "star" news items, which are then added to a separate list so you can easily find them later.
Another one of my favourite features is the mobile version (external link) of the application. It is much more basic and weighs in at about 2kb, which helps to cut down on mobile data costs. This mobile version gives you complete access to your RSS feeds when you're not at a computer. It will even reformat the websites that are linked to from the feed items to a more mobile-friendly format, which is a very nice finalising touch.
This is one of my most used websites and it is currently set as my homepage both at home and at work. I currently have around seventy-five RSS feeds in my list and it would be impossible to keep up with all those sites without this nifty application.
-
Radical Redesign vs. Subtle Redesign
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 upper-left, navigation should be a certain way, etc. The basic setup of a quality web page really does not change, only the style of the setup changes over time.
Rather than ditching your entire layout and starting fresh, it makes much more sense simply to update your design. Whether this includes brightening the colours, increasing spacing, or using less images (what you change will depend on the current trends), an update is much more practical than a from-scratch redesign.
Of course, a radical redesign is still practical in some situations. For example, at Lowter when we moved from our hobbyist stage to our professional stage, simply the style and the coding needed much revamping. In this case, it was more practical to start with a blank slate than to build off of our spaghetti code from beforehand. If your website is strung together in erratic, puzzle-like patterns, an entire redesign from scratch is probably the best solution. However, subtle redesigns work best for established websites with a strong foundation, like Lowter is today.
A good example of a subtle redesign is the recent redesign of BBC News (external link). The BBC is certainly an established entity and BBC News already had a very well-setup website. Their recent update they describe as "gardeners doing a bit of pruning and weeding". There is more spacing, bigger images, uniformity with the other BBC pages (which are all facing similar facelifts), and better video/audio capabilities. Certainly the updates are very subtle, but it makes the page look a whole lot better. BBC News shows how subtle updates can make a website seem fresh and new, without requiring "digging it up and starting from scratch".
When you go to update your website, think first about utilising your current design and simply making subtle changes to it in order to create a fresh feel. It may turn out that a subtle redesign is all that your website needs.
Browse Blog Archives
« April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 »
Sponsor: Sunbird Calendar Application
Manage your schedule easily and store it where you want to. (external link)
