BKeeney Briefs

As a software consultant I get asked by non-software developers why do people  have me write custom software when there are easy-to-use tools out there, like Microsoft Access, FileMaker, Visual Basic, and REALbasic?  It’s a tricky question to answer because they aren’t software developers nor or they power users.  They use their computers to write documents, email and surf the web – not exactly the rocket science apps of the world.  So I came up with an analogy that people understand.

This comes from the world of ‘Do It Yourself Home Repair’.  In my younger days (you can read that as not having a lot of money) I would always take a stab at doing all those little projects that come with owning a house.  Faucet needs replacing?  No problem!  I’d go size it up as best as I could, go to the hardware store and pick up what I thought were the parts and tools I needed.

Some of you know where this is going.  On the second trip to the hardware store I’d get the parts I REALLY needed to do the job and on the third trip to the hardware store I’d pick up the things I had no clue I needed to begin with (or possibly to fix what I broke in the process of fixing the original problem).  The final trip to the hardware store is to return all the unused parts.  And all that is assuming I don’t find a leak in the next day or two (or two weeks later).

Did I get the job done?  Sure but it took three trips to the hardware store and an entire day to do it.  I called a plumber to do the same thing recently and they were in and out in 30 minutes and if I’m not happy or something doesn’t work right they come back out (typically for free because I’ve already paid).  My job isn’t too much different than the plumber.

When people come to me for a project I can guess how much work is going to go into it a project before I’m done reading their requirements document (if they have one).  I’ve worked on three accounting applications and the ones that don’t like their current accounting app get excited about that.  I tell them that unless they’re willing to spend a boatload of money and wait a year it won’t happen.  Applications of that complexity are huge, hairy monsters that take time to develop and even then there are yearly (and sometimes monthly) updates (especially if you want payroll taxes calculated automatically).

Sometimes it’s a shame that there are easy-to-use products like FileMaker, MS Access and to a lesser extent Visual Basic and REALbasic.  FileMaker and Access are  powerful tools that let mere mortals do some complex things with a database.  Just like me having a set of minimal tools doesn’t make me a plumber these tools give the user the false impression that they’re a full-fledged database developer when in reality they know how to use some tools.  That’s not to put these folks down because they’ve done some really cool and complex work.

The plumber has a truck full of fittings and miscellaneous parts.  He or she also has a set of specialized tools to aid them in their work and have years of training.  Likewise, software developers have  specialized tools to help us as well and we have years worth of miscellaneous code, controls, libraries that we’ve learned to use.  And perhaps most of all, the software developer knows how to use the tools and parts together.

So sure, you could do your software project yourself and you’ll learn how to do preferences, file I/O, database operations, error handling, licensing and registration, automatic updates, custom controls, and a million other little things.  Software developers already know how to do that.  In the long run, how much is your time (and frustration) worth?

Thoughts?  Did I use the best analogy?  What other benefits are there to having a pro write your software for you?  Do you have any drawbacks?

http://www.noop.nl/2009/06/top-200-blogs-for-developers-q2-2009.html

A lot of recognizable names on the list from my own internet travels.  Sadly, I didn’t see anyone from the REALbasic community on the list or anyone that talks about RB on a regular basis (that I know of).

What are the blogs you hit on a regular basis?  What about RB blogs?

If you’ve been working with REALbasic for more than 6 months I guarantee that you know how to do something in RB that someone else needs help with.  I frequent the RB forums and for the most part I’m too late in answering a question – that’s how good the community is.  I’ll add comments when and where it makes sense, but for the most part, a majority of the questions are answered by less than 30 people even though there are tens of thousands of people registered.

REALbasic is easy-to-use and it doesn’t take a lot of development knowledge to make applications but, at one point in time, all of us were beginners with REALbasic.  When we had questions we turned to the NUG list or to the REALbasic forums and asked (you searched first, right?) the ‘experts’.

So what are you giving back to the community?  In past nine months or so I’ve been creating little example projects based on the questions on the RB Forums and put them into the The Association of REALbasic Professionals (ARBP) source code repository (free registration required).  Here are few of the highlights:

• Making a listbox popup menu
• Multi-line listbox
• Popup menu with icon example
• Printing using the Graphics Object along with companion articles for printing with On-Target Reports and RS Report.
• Stylegrid auto-height rows
• SQLizing text (automatic formatting of a string so you can use it in an SQL string)
• Calculator application

None of these projects are outstanding and they could certainly be done better but they are contributions to the community and someone might find them useful.  In fact, people are.  People have downloaded the hundreds of example projects and tutorials a lot.

The REALbasic community needs your experience and your input.  The first thing you can do is participate in the discussions on the RB forums.  Give advice and share your source code when you can.  There are tons of questions that get partial answers and you just might know how to help them.

Secondly, create some example projects demonstrating some very small technique.  Put them on your own website and link them to RBGarage or put them on ARBP.

Thirdly, think about giving something back to the community.  Hopfully you’ve gotten something from the REALbasic community and you can give something back.  Just because you think you’re not a ‘professional’ doesn’t mean you don’t have valuable insights and knowledge. Together we can come up with some amazing examples and help each other out.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this or not, but requests for quotes for REALbasic projects has been through the roof the past couple of weeks.  Between the REALbasic Developer Network (i.e. the Find a Consultant web page) and the ARBP Find a Developer web page it sure has been busy.  I can only find one “help me learn REALbasic” post in the past month or so.  This is a good thing since there used to be a bunch of them.

I don’t know if  RS marketing efforts are leading to these requests or if the ever-increasing Macintosh presense in the business world is making more people want cross-platform applications but something seems to have changed.  (Or it’s a combination of everything!)  Of course there’s nothing to say if the requests dry up in the next month or so.  Only time will tell.

I find it interesting that a lot of the recent projects are converting from either FileMaker or 4D.  RB can make a nice database application (assuming you know what you’re doing).  RS is always looking to enhance the user experience and I encourage RS to enhance their database tools.  I, however, do not want them to become another FileMaker or 4D because a generic application environment can do things better than a database-centric application, in my opinion.  Likewise there are things that FileMaker, 4D and MS Access do better than a generic application environment like RB.  It depends upon the requirements, in the long run.

Since I help run ARBP you can take this criticism with a grain of salt.  One of my biggest beefs with the RS developer program is that it’s simply a forwarded email.  If you signed up today you’d miss everything from last week (if you did sign up I’d certainly ask for all recent posts since $1k is nice chunk of change).  With ARBP we keep them around for a while (which is a problem all by itself that I’m trying to correct).  Another point is there isn’t a whole lot of information in the posts.  A contact information (name, email, phone) and a brief description of the project.  It would be nice to get more information.  What platforms?  Is it an existing project?  Is it a conversion project?  From what language?  Is it commercial or internal software?  I could probably continue on what I’d like to see, but I’d be repeating myself.

As a consultant, are you busy?  Better yet, are you as busy as you’d like to be?  Have you seen any trends in the past six months?

ARBP has new survey available asking about the interest level in a REALbasic Developer Conference.  The survey is here.

There are no details on the conference at this point in time.  We are simply getting a feel for what people are thinking.

Here’s what I will share:

1)  This is NOT a Real Software sponsored event (though I suppose they could be a sponsor)

2) Attendance will most likely be limited (the smaller the cheaper it is but some of it depends upon the response)

3) We’re aiming for a weekend event so as not to disrupt work for too many folks (since we know a lot of RB professionals are sole proprietors)

So please take the survey and if you have other ideas and suggestions I’d love to hear from you in the comments section!

One of the things that’s tough as a small business owner is getting away from work.  Heck, even if you’re not ‘working’ you’re thinking about work and stressed about work or the lack thereof or any one of a million things.  So it’s important to get away every now and then.

I know that a lot of my peers aren’t this lucky, but I have an employee that can handle a lot of stuff while I’m gone.  We put that to the test this past week and a half as the family took an Alaskan cruise.  Traveling can be stressful in its own right but I’ve discovered a couple of things about cruises:  if you are hungry or bored you’re doing it intentionally.

Our cruise ports were Seattle, Ketchikan, fjording, Juneau, Skagway, Victoria and finally back to Seattle.  We had three cameras, one video recorder and two iPhones.  Without even looking at the video we have over 1500 pictures from 10 days.  This does not include any that my brother-in-law and his family took.  I think I might have to cull it down a bit to fit it on to the iMovie DVD tradition. 

The weather was perfect the entire time.  No rain at all – which had some of the Alaskan’s concerned (because the new Walmart had run out of hoses).  I enjoyed Seattle far more than I expected.  The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was cool (the gift shop sucked).  The Glass Museum in Tacoma was pretty cool as well though the real highlight was taking the bridge across the highway with all the Don Chiluhy samples.

Without a doubt the wildlife and scenery were the highlights of the Alaskan trip.  I can honestly say, though, that I’m done with ‘pretty mountains with snow’ for a while.  We saw a couple of glaciers but didn’t see any calving.  Oh well, the bald Eagles, whales and the bear cub made up for it.

I’m writing this after a hectic day of catching up on emails that my employee couldn’t deal with and doing all the things to catch up on news in the tech world.  It was a busy week with all of the Apple announcements.  Being disconnected from the internet left me feeling ‘disconnected’ but that in itself is a very good thing because I needed it – it had been well over a year since I took any significant time off.

I feel refreshed (though tired) and ready to get back into multiple projects.  My employee handled the minor situations that came up with absolutely no issues and now he’s ready to go on his vacation.  It seems that there are a half-dozen projects that are very close to happening which means we’ll be crazy busy for a while.  But that’s okay.  Being disconnected for a while has restored my sense of balance.  You should try it sometime.

It’s been an interesting six weeks as our kitchen has been remodeled.  Thankfully we’re within days of getting our kitchen back and can finally do some hosting.  The person doing the remodeling has done an awesome job and we’ve had many discussions on being in business.  It’s funny because our discussions mirror what I have with software developers that have their own business.  I suspect that most business owners have the same sorts of problems.

One topic that comes up over and over again is pricing.  Our remodeler gave up trying to compete solely on price long ago because there’s always someone new to the profession that wants to get their foot in the door.  Either that or they really have no idea what their time is worth.  Don’t forget that you should always be aware of what your real costs are because whatever your hourly rate is it should take into account tools and equipment, all forms of taxes, training time, vacation time, sick time, insurance,  and your retirement.  Also you need to plan on NOT having work for a period of time.  All of these factors increase your rate.

The question of having or not having employees seems to be a tricky one.  I’ve always maintained that I want employees smarter than me (depending on who you ask that might not be hard, but I digress….) because I don’t want to babysit and have to explain everything and make all the decisions.  In fact, I’d like to learn a few things from my employees.  The argument can be made that I’m training my potential competitors and that may be true but so far that has not happened and I refuse to live in fear of that.

I’ve been in business long enough to realize that it takes a special person to own and run a business.  There is no day off and you just don’t stop thinking about work at 5:00 PM and restart thinking about it at 8:00 AM the next day or on Monday.  It just doesn’t work that way and anyone who’s going to start their own business based on that belief should just stop right now.  Sure I have the flexibility to go to the gym at 1 in the afternoon, but does that make up for answering tech support emails at 11:30 at night?  Only you can make the determination as a business owner.

Do you have a plan for your business or are you ‘going with the flow’?  I look at it this way:  Do you have a job or do you run a business?  A job is something you go to every day to pay the bills.  A business is something that you manage and plan on growing into something bigger than it is right now.  So whatever plans you have, write them down.  Once you right them down you can start acting on them.

What are your plans for 6 months from now?  A year?  Do you plan on hiring any additional staff?  Do you have plans for new products or updates to existing ones?

These are all questions you need to ask yourself when you’re managing your business.  If you’re not, you might just have a job.

There are hints from posters in the RB forums that they think that when Real Software releases REALbasic with Cocoa support that everything will be awesome and that it will be the second coming of sliced bread.  I hate to burst their bubble.

In their June newsletter, Real Software said that Cocoa was taking longer than they anticipated and would happen sometime this summer.  I read this as “not happening in R3.”

Before you get your panties in wad, the switchover from Carbon to Cocoa is ugly.  It’s not simple nor straightforward.  I predict that it will take at minimum two releases before it’s really usable and perhaps three before you can really release apps with it.  I say this not as someone who’s trying to bag on the engineers doing the work, I say this because it’s that big of a deal.

If RS only had to deal with Macintosh OS X it would be easier.  In fact, it would probably already be done.  However, since REALbasic is all about cross-platform, anything that’s changing for Cocoa will also affect Windows and Linux applications because all controls for Cocoa need to be updated so it’s a seamless as possible for those platforms.

Real Software is correctly taking their time with Cocoa support because it needs to be done correctly.  If not, we might as well start looking for another development platform.  It’s worth it for them to not rush Cocoa support and to get it done properly so that when we finally start using it it ‘just works’.  That still means that we (the developers using it) will find many, many issues that they’ll have to fix, tweak, and modify.

So be patient and be understanding.  RS has been planning for this transition for years now.  Will it be painful?  Probably.  Will there be outrage and indignation from certain segments of the community?  Count on it.  Will 3rd party controls, plugins and classes break?  Absolutely.  Will Cocoa be worth the wait?  I have no doubt because Apple has said that Carbon will go away.  And that you can take to the bank.

I miss Real World, I really do.  I’ve written about it a few times and it comes up in conversations with RB developers a lot.  Real Software may or may not do regional events (we haven’t heard anything to date on them).  I miss the conversations and friendships that come with Real World.  Sometimes it helps knowing that I’m not the only one out there with the problems I have in business.

So my question is this:  If someone came up with a small event, in an easy to get to location, focused entirely on REALbasic technical topics would you attend?  What sort of topics would interest you?  What topics would turn you off to the event?  What’s more important:  Location, Pricing, or Topics?

I have a confession.  I am an email junkie. My in box is my to do list and I keep it fastidiously clean.  I get an email and deal with it NOW.  I get hundreds of emails a day (most of it spam that I have to make sure isn’t legitimate) and this was distracting me to the point of making my productivity on real work go down.  I can’t live without email because it’s the bread and butter of my business.

My solution?  I simply cut down on the frequency of checking for new mail.  Instead of every 5 minutes (I don’t remember if that’s the default in Apple’s Mail or not) I now have it set for every 30 minutes.

Seems like a simple thing but 30 minutes of uninterrupted work is worth it.

Do you have similar problems?  What have you done to increase your productivity?