My goal when writing any piece of software that ends up in the hands of a human being has always been: “make it software they don’t even notice they’re using”. I’ve worked with plenty of developers who take an incredible amount of pride in what they do and spend hours tweaking the tiniest of details as though they were carving a masterpiece from a block of marble (some of them have been, effectively). Agonising over pixels. Button placement. Colours. Every tiny detail. But that doesn’t matter a jot if the software they’ve built gets in the way of the person using it.

Cameras are wonderful and as a photographer I love the technology behind them: their lenses, the use of filters and a host of other things I’ve written about before. But a camera isn’t the end result, a camera is a tool to take a photograph and the photograph is the end product. A photographer doesn’t want the camera to get in the way of taking a beautiful photo. If you need to take a quick snap you don’t want to spend ages clicking buttons and going through menus, you want to point and shoot. If you want a landscape photo with a digital SLR you want to take a meter reading, pick your shutter speed and aperture – concentrating on the details of the exposure – and take the photo. You don’t want anything slowing you down. You want to concentrate on what you’re doing – composing and taking the perfect photo.

Software, for me, is exactly the same.

John’s Background Switcher is, by some margin, the most widely used piece of software I’ve built. I designed it to sit in the background, be easy to set up and then stay completely out of the way. Most people can install it, set it up without thinking about it – they know what they want to do and it helps them to do that. Next they leave it alone, giving it no thought again. It’s taken years for it to get to that stage and hundreds of users telling me what they loved and what they hated. I’ve learned a hell of a lot more about human psychology building JBS than I have about algorithms and elegant coding practises.

The best way to demonstrate how things have changed is via my uninstall feedback page. When you remove JBS you can opt to leave feedback as to why. It’s the single smartest thing I ever did as I learned very quickly why people who’d bothered to install it then later removed it. Early on they’d complain about finding it confusing, not being able to do X (even though JBS did actually let you do X, it’s just the person hadn’t worked out how) and a host of other minor things that made JBS “not good enough” in my eyes. When someone is confused or can’t figure out how to use any aspect of software I’ve written it’s not a failure of that person, it’s a failure of me not making it simple and obvious enough to use and I learned a great deal, gradually evolving JBS and my software design philosophy over time.

The difference is that nowadays I’d say 99% of people uninstalling JBS who leave me feedback start by saying that they “love” JBS and are removing it because they’re changing jobs, or their computer is misbehaving and they’re removing all software, or their son is going to college and they’re giving them their laptop so cleaning it up first or even their wife doesn’t like it. They tend not to say they can’t figure out how it works any more and given the cross-section of people using JBS (see the Facebook user demographics below) I must be doing something right:

People don’t usually email me telling me how great the user interface is or how good the photo choices are – they tell me how they hate their job but when they’ve had enough they minimise their windows and see montages of photos of a family holiday with their kids and that gets them through their day. It’s not about the software, it’s about what the people who use it want to do and for software to be something people can care about and even declare that they love, it’s not the software they emotionally connect to, it’s what that software lets them do without getting in their way.

Which brings me onto Facebook. Facebook is brilliant. No really, it is. It’s brilliant in the way it manages to replicate real-world social interactions.

Say you and a friend are sat at a table in a bar talking about your Star Wars figure collection (you’re obsessed with them). A mutual friend spots you, saunters over and sits with you, joining in the conversation and you catch up – you’ve not seen each other since Comic-Con. You  take out some polaroids you took of your new Jabba the Hutt figurine to show around and your friends all laugh at you as you flip through them. Next your ex-girlfriend (or ex-boyfriend) appears and comes over with her hunk of a new boyfriend / girlfriend who is definitely not into Star Wars figures. You ignore them and they go away. Or maybe you and your friends have a go at their new partner (in a funny way) and they go away. Or maybe they join in the banter and sit down. A couple more friends turn up and you have a good old catch up, take some polaroids and share them around to remember your fun night of drinking and talk. You then go home and write up in your diary some of your experiences of the day, sticking some of those polaroids in place to remember for years to come or look at them and laugh the next time those friends are round at your house. Or maybe you’ll show them to another friend who couldn’t make it.

In the real world this sort of social experience is effortless but prior to Facebook trying to replicate that situation “virtually” was always a compromise. Facebook eloquently lets you do all of the above (except the drinking) with the fact that you have a wall. You can look at the wall, the walls of your friends or a stream of posts on walls of you and your friends all at onces. This is what I find brilliant. The wall is you sat at a table. You add memories to it by uploading pictures, making posts, other people commenting and so on. If you want to know what your friends have been up to lately, or maybe just the friends from your previous company have been up to, then you can find out on Facebook arguably faster than you could do in the real world (assuming they use Facebook).

I know, Facebook didn’t invent the wall, MySpace was using a similar approach and I’m sure plenty of other sites were. It’s just that Facebook refined the idea, concentrated on what it is us humans want to do – interact with each other in a variety of human ways like we do in the real world – and created software that gets out of the way and lets you get on with it. I barely even think about Facebook when I use it and never have – instead I’m thinking about the people I’m interacting with and what I want to do in terms of interacting with them. The friends who’ll see a video of bull frog playing ant crusher I came across. Perusing photos of my brother and what he’s up to. New baby announcements. Videos of friends cats. It’s a great way to stay in touch with people I’d rarely see otherwise.

However there’s a problem. It may be a little too good. I’ve spent the past year or so posting frequently to Facebook. I’d post photos, talk about what I’ve been up to, things going through my head, things I’ve read and pretty much all the things I’d normally do with people in the real world. I’d also take an active part in what my friends were up to, commenting freely. Whenever I’d meet friends for real they’d point out that I was always the most prolific poster and would cut me off telling a story saying they already knew it. So it was working. There was no two ways about it, my friends would stay in touch with me whether they liked it or not (well, unless they unsubscribed).

But did I feel as close to those people through Facebook as in the real world? I’d have to say “no”. It’s all a bit too superficial.

It’s like being a movie star at one of those Hollywood parties where everybody air kisses saying “darling, you look fabulous!” but nobody has a meaningful conversation about anything. Facebook enables a lot more communication and it’s easy to get sucked into that constant craving to see what’s new and if someone’s replied to your post or vice versa. Like that Hollywood party set. But what it doesn’t do is replace sitting around a table just talking to each other. It’s no substitute for the real world and if anything I feel I’ve drifted further away from my real friends as a result. It’s not a substitute for sitting around a table in a bar just talking. More communication doesn’t necessarily mean better.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think Facebook is brilliant. You can interact with people without even thinking about it and it can feel like it’s just the same as the real thing. It’s my ideal software – focussing on the human and allowing them to use it effortlessly to interact with other people. But it’s still missing a more meaningful way to stay in touch. I remember when my brother lived in San Francisco and thanks to Skype it made the world seem a lot smaller. In fact I probably spoke to him more then than when he was living in Edinburgh!

Google+ has a feature called “hangouts” that lets you have group video chats. I never really saw the point of it until I saw this ad:

Hangouts are actually very cool, particularly on a phone which is the place I use social software like Facebook 99.9% of the time. Facebook does have video calling, but that’s one to one and you can’t have group conversations which sort of defeats the whole point of it. If Facebook had a slick way to turn a multi-person written conversation or chat into a video conversation that was as effortless as using the rest of its user interface then they’d have an absolute killer feature. Yeah I know Google+ has hangouts and I should switch to Google+ but Facebook has already crossed the generation divide (in that both the parents and children of my friends use it) and I just don’t have room in my life for another social network!

I never normally do New Year Resolutions but this year I’ve decided to spend a lot less time “interacting” on Facebook and a lot more time “interacting” with friends in the real world instead. It may mean less communication and not knowing what everybody is up to at any given time. But it’ll be less communication with a lot more meaning. Unless of course Facebook follows my advice!

P.S. There aren’t 17 thoughts here, I just like the number 17. And making you keep count!

Even better were the calibre of people. I always want to work with people  I can learn from and RiskMetrics was definitely that place. I was working with people who were incredibly smart, insightful, able to think in ways you just can’t teach and analyse and solve the sort of problems that make your brain implode. Hearing about so-called rock star programmers and the type of people who can change the world is one thing, but when you’re sat in a room with them while they think about how to solve incredibly far reaching and complex problems was quite another. I had to pinch myself to believe I was working with these people.

We spent a couple of years building our product under the leadership of and with help from some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. And as a result we built something that continued to push the envelope of what you can do with the Microsoft development platform. Everybody who saw our software was blown away – there was literally nothing to touch it in terms of usability and potential in the industry and by the middle of 2010 we had ticks in most of the boxes potential customers were looking for. The team expanded so that development was happening in the UK, Switzerland and the USA. Everything was coming together better than I could have expected (up until then I didn’t believe you could do distributed development in this way but it turns out that with the right people you can).

And then everything changed. After some unconfirmed rumours it transpired that we were being bought out. Since most of us had been through this sort of thing before we decided to just keep our heads down and continue building our product. Many others became consumed by speculation and couldn’t focus. Of course the writing was on the wall and ultimately the decision was made to close our office and kill our product – literally exactly the same thing that happened to me almost 7 years ago. Some things never change!

The last time this happened I was a little bitter and twisted and annoyed that we’d come so close to success but been cut down before our time. This time I shrugged my shoulders thinking “such is big business” and phoned a recruitment agent. I figured there was no sense wishing things were different – people way above my pay grade had made the decision and whether it was right or wrong (in my eyes) that didn’t matter. What’s done was done and it was time to move on and find something new. And that’s exactly what I did.

So just a few weeks later I started  at a company called FinancialForce.com. They build an accounting product on the Salesforce.com cloud computing platform, something I’d not really paid attention to (I’d been so busy building software on the Microsoft platform I hadn’t really looked outside that for a while). So far I think it’s fair to say I’ve landed on my feet and in many ways my new role is a much better fit for what I enjoy doing than my previous one (so every cloud has a silver lining after all). Plus after only a few weeks I feel like I’ve known my new colleagues for years (always a good sign)!

And the more I learn about the force.com platform (as it’s known) the more impressed I am. I’m used to having to build software from the ground up and therefore having to reinvent the wheel every time (and wasting months doing it). On force.com you’ve got so much for free in terms of an application platform, relational database, consistent user interface model, batch processing, scalable, reliable hosting, the fact that you’re building on a trusted platform, the list goes on. Sure, you’re giving up quite a lot of control – you have to live within the limitations of the platform and there are plenty of things you can’t do – but on the whole it means you spend a lot less time writing boilerplate code and a lot more time focusing on actually building a product.

So all in all it’s been a very interesting couple of years filled with many highs and lows. But if it’s alright with you I’ll be quite happy if things stay the same for a while. All this being bought out makes me feel like a commodity rather than a human being!

I’ve also used SourceGear Vault for version control for a few years and it has the handy ability to hook into FogBugz such that when checking in some code I can associate it with a case in FogBugz. This means I can look at all the code changes for a given case and see what it was that made me break some vital piece of functionality, although there’s no automatic way to see cases related to a checkin.

My good friend John Topley has been telling me how great distributed version control systems (DVCS) are for ages now (regular readers will know that John is forever telling me how great something is and then 6-12 months later I realise that he’s always right and follow up – like buying a Mac, an iPhone and many other things). When I attended the Scotland on Rails conference last year with John I saw a demonstration of working with Git (one of the DVCS out there) and I was impressed.

Very briefly, instead of having a central repository that you get the latest copy of the source from, make changes then commit them, you clone the entire repository (with all of its history) onto your machine. You can make changes, commit them (locally) and then when you’re ready push all those changes up to your central repository. You can also choose when to pull changes from the central repository locally – the cool thing being that you don’t actually have to update your local source with those changes until you’re ready. This means super fast checkins (since you’re not going over the network) and you can work in isolation while being able to unwind changes without affecting other people. When you’re ready you push those changes out so that everybody else can pull them to their local repositories. Suddenly things like branching, merging, multiple development paths and a host of things that can be painful to do in systems like SVN are much easier. If you really want to know about distributed version control systems then read Joel Spolsky’s tutorial here – hginit.com. What, you’ve read it already? Let’s carry on.

So a while ago I heard that FogCreek were working on a version control system – called Kiln – that integrated seamlessly with FogBugz but I was a bit busy at the time so added it to my “to get back to” list. A couple of weeks ago I finally remembered to have a look at it and bought myself a license (knowing that I had nothing to lose with their no hassle money back guarantee). After installing I started importing the source from my projects into Kiln. The first problem I had was that Vault seems to have no easy way to export the source history but since I’ve still got Vault running I can always go back and find older versions if I need to (which I most likely won’t).

The import was easy and it then became a case of getting used to using Mercurial (which is the DVCS system upon which Kiln is built) and how it does things. Having read Joel’s tutorial again (and paying attention this time) I was quickly up and running. Even though I’m the only person who works on my own projects (by choice), being able to have multiple cloned local repositories means I can try radical things out, take advantage of source control while I do that and choose to push the changes into Kiln or just delete the lot. And I don’t need to mess around creating branches only to later delete them or go through the pain of merging them in. Ultimately it means the time between checking in can be a lot shorter knowing that only when I’m finished with a piece of work do I need to push it to Kiln. In a team environment this rocks – you don’t have to worry about colleagues picking up your half-finished work and them complaining when things have broken.

When you’re developing on Windows you can install the “Kiln Client Tools” which puts TortoiseHg and some addons onto your system and makes authenticating and cloning repositories from Kiln dead easy. If you’re on a Mac you can install Mercurial tools yourself and it all works nice and smoothly. Since there are plugins for most development environments (like Visual Studio and Eclipse) you can use Kiln (Mercurial) seamlessly as though you were using SVN with the added security of it being a DVCS. Welcome to 21st century software development. Sweet.

The FogBugz integration with Kiln gives what I like to call “360 degree traceability” (something my friend Ian and I love about Team Foundation Server). If I commit a change with something like “Case 123: Fixed the divide by zero error” as the checkin note and push that to Kiln, then automatically case 123 will show that commit on its case page so I can see the changeset details and likewise when looking at the history in Kiln there’ll be a link from that changeset to case 123 in FogBugz. When trying to find out why changes have broken other parts of a system this sort of visibility can be incredibly useful, particularly where a team of multiple developers work on the same code base.

Another cool feature of Kiln which is absolutely no use to me on my own projects is a powerful code review tool. I’ve never really done code reviews in any place I’ve worked – it’s seemed like there’s never enough time to do it. However looking at how easy it is to create and manage code reviews in Kiln makes me think that were I using Kiln at work in my team then we’d definitely start using them. You’d pathalogically avoid branching and merging in Visual SourceSafe because it’s horribly hard to do (since SourceSafe sucks) but using a system like Mercurial makes that so easy you don’t even think twice about it. And so it is with code reviews, they’re so easy to do in Kiln that there’s no excuse not to do them.

In summary I’m very impressed with FogCreek Kiln. FogBugz has set a very high bar in terms of quality and ease of use and Kiln sits as though it was there from the start. Next time I build a development team and choose the tools I’ll be going down the FogBugz / Kiln route for sure, I’d be an idiot not to!

Let me start by saying that while I’ve made a career out of building software on Microsoft’s platform with their tools, I’m not a die-hard fan who thinks the Microsoft way is the one true way. I like to think I’m relatively open minded and can see the benefits of one platform over another. As such I tend not to bother with Microsoft beta software and try not to listen to hype about not-yet-released products and technologies. I prefer to wait until things are released for real and then see what they’re like. I could cite many instances over the years where things haven’t lived up to the expectations but on the whole Microsoft get there in the end.

Anyway, having spent a few days listening to various sessions discussing what tools and technologies Microsoft will be releasing early next year I’ve come away very impressed. I’ve worked on all kinds of software over the years from small standalone applications to web apps that have had to scale across a few servers, so have found myself spending a lot of time writing similar code over and over again that can be quite tricky (such as multi-threaded code that can handle all the various exception cases that are easily missed). What came across loud and clear was that, aside from Azure which I’ll mention in a minute, a great deal of support is being added to the languages and tools to make multi-core software development a lot easier to write. There are tools to make multi-threaded debugging easier to visualise and understand, simplified ways to handle concurrent processing without really having to think about locking, blocking, race conditions and so forth (clever people than I at Microsoft have done that for you). One of the most interesting things I saw was AppFabric which makes scaling services across multiple servers a whole lot easier than it currently is handing a distributed cache and so forth.

Azure – which is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform – was the big thing Microsoft were talking about at the PDC. It just so happens that my company have been working with Microsoft to spread out some of the calculations that one of our products performs to the cloud and are hoping to eventually run it across 10,000 nodes in time, so my colleague who’s been lucky enough to work on the project knows all about Azure. While Microsoft are somewhat behind the curve in terms of cloud computing for the masses, I’m very confident from what I’ve seen and heard from the inside and out that Azure is going to be a real game changer. Anybody who’s used development tools across platforms knows that Microsoft produces the best ones and Azure nicely plugs into these tools to the point where a Visual Basic programmer will be able – without having to be an expert in writing and deploying highly scalable software – to write an application like Facebook that can scale to incredible proportions at the click of a button. You’ll be able to take a standard web application and without a great deal of work deploy it to Azure and suddenly you don’t have to worry about the cost and maintenance of servers.

And if you’re not a Microsoft person that’s fine, you can run LAMP on Azure and I was rather surprised to see Matt Mullenweg appear during the keynote speech and talk about how you can run WordPress on Azure (in fact Oddly Specific, from the people behind LolCats, runs on Azure in that configuration). I found this the most surprising thing of all – that Microsoft isn’t doing its usual platform lock-in trick. Clearly under Ray Ozzie’s guidance Microsoft’s moving in new directions.

Of course Azure isn’t for everyone. Most of the companies I’ve worked at wouldn’t be at all happy letting their data live out in the cloud on Microsoft’s servers and don’t have the complex calculation requirements that the cloud can help with (i.e. being able to pay for the processing that you use rather than buying a load of servers you only use a tiny percentage of the time). But I can see people like the next Facebook, financial institutions, research institutes, NASA and so forth will lap it up. I just think of when my colleagues formed their start-up the first thing they had to do was buy a load of kit and that cost money. If they were starting next year instead all they’d need would cheap computers to develop on, no office or server room, deploy to the cloud, only pay for what they use, and they’d be able to do it with all the knowledge of developing on the Microsoft platform already. Like I say, I think it’s going to be a game changer. And as an added bonus I’ll finally be able to build John’s Dead Man’s Switch and know that in the incredibly unlikely event it becomes popular, it’ll be able to handle it!

• Better (i.e. some) multiple monitor support.
• An automatic desktop background changer built in.

Finally with the release of a Windows 7 beta, at least one of those two features has been implemented (and it’s the latter). I’ve been half-hoping Microsoft would do this for a while now even if it meant the end of JBS. This isn’t from laziness but much though I love developing it and the community of users that’s built up around it, I have lots of other ideas and only limited free time to work on them. Currently most of that free time is taken up with JBS to the detriment of anything else I could be working on. Having said that I’d be hard pushed to produce anything as successful as JBS (except the planned Mac version perhaps) so if I can keep it alive I’m not exactly going to complain!

I downloaded the first beta of Windows 7 to take a look at this potential JBS-killing feature and having played around with it it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t actually replace JBS at all, but instead nicely complements it. Windows 7 expands the dialog that lets you set your background so that instead of choosing one picture you can choose a selection of them and how frequently you’d like the background to be changed, you then leave it to it:

I saw on some pre-beta screenshots that there was an option to use RSS feeds as a photo source (just like JBS does) but see that feature missing from the current beta. If they do ship with RSS support then that would be extremely cool (and lessen the appeal of JBS slightly) but if not then that’s fine with me. So if you want to change your background periodically using specific pictures on your computer then the built-in Windows 7 desktop slideshow is for you – there’s no point installing JBS. However before I stop developing JBS and resolve all the outstanding tasks as “will never implement” I can see several reasons why I’ll keep working on JBS.

First is multiple monitor support. When I started developing JBS very few people used multiple monitors but today a surprisingly large percentage of users do. The Windows 7 desktop slideshow doesn’t appear to let you do things like have different pictures on different monitors or span one across all. That may change when they ship but considering Microsoft’s complete lack of useful multiple monitor support in the past it wouldn’t surprise me if things remain as they are. JBS lets you have different pictures on different monitors or stretch across all and in the next version I’m planning some even better multiple monitor options.

Next is tight integration with web-based sites like Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Phanfare and others. Even if Windows 7 supports RSS feeds it’ll still be a bit tricky to choose from all your friends photos on Flickr (including private ones), or the most interesting pictures over the last 7 days, or your private photos on Picasas web albums and so forth. So for avid users of these photo sites (like myself), JBS will still do a better job than the built in desktop slideshow.

Next is choice and variation. The current version of JBS and to a far greater extent the next version can let you choose background pictures from multiple sources – some local folders, some sets from several photo sites, some RSS feeds and search results. If you like randomness or have a bunch of accounts on different sites you want to pull photos from then reverting to the built-in switcher will lose you that flexibility. Also, if you want to use pictures from a folder on your machine then with the built-in desktop slideshow you’ll have to keep telling it about new ones you add to that folder before they’ll turn up on your desktop – JBS on the other hand can just monitor folders for you and work things out itself.

And last but not least the montages and post-processing effects JBS has to offer appear not to have a place in the Windows 7 switcher. Being able to create a snapshot scrapbook or mosaic of photos across multiple monitors is pretty cool and one of the better ideas I had for JBS:

All in all I’m really glad to see that a background switcher will be built into the next version of Windows 7 – it’s something long overdue. And I’m also glad to see that there’s plenty of scope for me to keep building functionality into JBS and improving it without feeling like I’m wasting my time – there’s clearly still a place for JBS. Heck, there may even be a way to hook the cool functionality JBS has directly into the built-in desktop slideshow so that Windows 7 users can have the best of both worlds.

The Windows 7 desktop slideshow is, like a lot of the new functionality Microsoft has added, a straight clone of what’s available on the Mac. And despite the fact that Macs have had automatic background switching built in for years it hasn’t stopped a lot of people requesting I write a Mac version of JBS (a request I’ll finally be fulfilling soon) so I don’t expect people wanting to run JBS on Windows when they upgrade to 7 to stop either.

If I see people on a weekend typing away on their BlackBerry (and I’ve seen a few) I want to shake them and tell them to enjoy their spare time while it lasts.

So when I was presented with a work BlackBerry at the start of the year I made sure the email notification was turned off and used it strictly as a phone to make and receive calls from my colleagues. At all other times it was sat on my desk being ignored.

Last week my BlackBerry was replaced with a brand new BlackBerry Bold and while I initially expected to treat it the same way as the old one, I’ve actually been blown away with what a cool piece of kit it is. As before I’m not going to use it particularly to send emails – the keyboard’s too small and if I’m working then I’m in front of a computer so can send and receive them there. And if I’m not working then the last thing I want to do is send and receive work emails! However it does a great job of letting me do the following:

• Listen to MP3s – it comes as standard with 2GB of storage and a pretty good pair of earphones with in-ear rubber inserts (ideal for cutting out background noise).
• Surf the internet – not only is it 3G but it can connect to the interweb via WiFi with a pretty good browser.
• Take pictures – my previous BlackBerry couldn’t and while the camera’s not amazing, it’s good enough to take pictures of chickens wandering the streets (which is the sort of thing I’d take a picture of).
• Use for Sat Nav – it has GPS and European maps built in along with directions so I can use it to get from here to there (although to be fair I mostly one go from my house to the cafe).
• Stalk my brother – he’s got a BlackBerry Pearl and the BlackBerry Instant Messenger is always turned on, mwa ha ha, there is no escape!
• Get my sudoku fix – oh yes, there’s even a sudoku game!
• Send SMS messages without using that useless T9 predictive texting – since it has a full QWERTY keyboard it makes life somewhat easier to text.
• Get 2-for-1 cinema tickets – since it’s on Orange (the old one was on Vodafone) I can take advantage of Orange Wednesdays.

In summary, I’m really impressed with it. So much so that I’ve diverted all calls from my own mobile and am going to use the BlackBerry as a my primary phone. In one fell swoop it’s managed to retire not only my own mobile but my iPod Touch (well, for short train journeys at least) and my Sat Nav. It’s going to encourage me to go to the cinema more often and save my thumbs from premature arthritis brought on by sending SMS texts using T9 predictive texting.

But if you see me sending work emails on the train you have my permission to shake your head and call me a hypocrite!

The point is, accidents can happen, I could shuffle off the mortal coil at any point. For me that’s the end of it, but what about my good lady? Sure, she’ll have to deal with the loss, sell the house, cash in the insurance policies and buy a nice beach house somewhere warm. But without knowing the login details to this site she won’t be able to write a post informing the world wide web that I’m dead. She won’t be able to look at all my old emails and realise I’d been living a double life as a bigamist / spy / special forces operative / singer in a church choir / take your pick. She won’t be able to log onto my Windows 2003 server and apply the latest patches, or update Apache on the box John’s Adventures runs on. She won’t even be able to log on to see my credit card statements and wonder why I’d made so many payments to Interflora when I never used to buy her flowers.

In short, my untimely death would leave a lot of loose ends that I doubt I could solve from beyond the grave. Then I came up with a solution – it’s called John’s Dead Man Switch.

The idea is simple. If I don’t browse to a particular web page or click a particular button on my computer every 3 weeks, then an email will magically send itself to my good lady. That email will contain not only all the login details to every site and computer I use, but an explanation of how to use any of these systems that she’ll understand. It’ll have things like a step by step guide to creating a new article here announcing my death, approving comments and so forth. Knowing me the email will start with something like this:

“Hello good wife, you have received this email for one of the following reasons. Either I’m dead, in which case I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m even more sorry to inform you that you’re not allowed to marry someone younger and hunkier than me (unless it’s my brother). Or alternatively I’ve forgotten to press my dead man’s switch and you can delete this email now. Hmmm, now I think about it, if the latter is the case then maybe I should have put that first to spare you the trauma…”

Now the way I see it John’s Dead Man Switch (or JDMS) will consist of a couple of components. First there’ll be a web site that lets me manage my dead man’s switch so I can:

• Click a link to reset my dead man’s switch and prove I’m alive.
• Determine the minimum timeout – if I go on holiday for a month I’d want to make the time-before-assumed-death or TBAD a bit longer.
• Decide on how often an “are you still alive?” email should be sent (if I’m dead I won’t receive it but if I’m alive but forgetful it’ll remind me to click the dead man’s switch).
• Upload and edit my “Used to be-mail” – strong encryption would be a requirement to ensure nobody else can read the contents even if they break into the site and that the JDMS platform is secure.
• Download one of the JDMS client applications.

Which brings me onto the JDMS client applications themselves. The client applications will need to support all major operating systems (including the iPhone) and the user interface will consist of a large button that looks something like this:

I’m thinking I can either have it scheduled to appear at the intervals I’ve set on the website, run manually as-and-when, or appearing every 2 minutes in case I’m so strung out on coffee that I need reminding that I’m still alive!

Clearly John’s Dead Man Switch needs some further investigation and a full specification fleshing out. At the moment it’s just an idea but, unless someone else has only gone and come up with the idea already, I think I’ll make it my next side project. So what do you think of John’s Dead Man Switch? The next great thing or dead before it begins?!

First of all, let’s look at SnagIt 8:

SnagIt 8 is simple. The tools you need are on the left, such as boxes, arrows, highlighter, text and so forth. The image you’ve captured is in the middle and all effects are on the right such as resizing the image, adding a drop shadow, a torn effect (which is what I’ve used), adding a caption and so on. I frequently capture an image, draw some boxes, arrows and text on it, then add an edge effect – usually that torn paper one – then resize it and save it. Since everything is in one place it takes the minimal number of mouse clicks, all the tools such as the arrow tool remember the settings I’d used before (such as the colour, thickness and depth of shadow) so once I’ve used SnagIt one time it’ll remember everything from then on. Simple.

Now let’s look at SnagIt 9:

The first thing to note is that it uses the fancy new Ribbon control that was introduced by Microsoft in Office 2007 (it’s the strip at the top of the dialog labelled Draw, Image, Hotspots, Tags, etc. and when you click on one it reveals a bunch of related controls). When Microsoft introduced the ribbon a lot of people complained – people hate change after all. However Microsoft put a great deal of effort into deciding what controls to put on which section of the ribbon so that commonly used controls lived next to each other and were easy to discover. After struggling with it for a bit myself I have to admit that Office is far better for the new ribbon. Sadly I can’t say the same about SnagIt.

While the ribbon looks sexy in SnagIt, it’s pretty clear that not a great deal of thought went into deciding what goes where. OK, there may have been a lot of thought about it, but unlike the Office team TechSmith didn’t have the usability statistics to see how people actually use the product. And in a straw poll of one person (me) I have to say that SnagIt 9 has actually made my life harder and as a result I’ve rolled back to version 8 – the first time I’ve ever preferred an older product over a new one.

Take my standard workflow. I’ll capture an image, draw some boxes and arrows, resize it, add a torn edge effect and save. In SnagIt 8 I’d do the following (and I’m assuming I’ve run through the process previously and SnagIt has saved my preferences):

1. Capture the image
2. Click the ‘box’ tool and draw a box
3. Click the ‘arrow’ tool and draw an arrow
4. Click the ‘Resize Image’ button on the right and choose the size
5. Click the ‘Edge Effects’ button then choose ‘Torn Edge’
6. Save image

In SnagIt 9, things are no longer as simple. Now I have to do the following (and note that I’m assuming I’ve run through the process before so SnagIt should really remember my presets like SnagIt 8 does):

1. Capture the image (same as before)
2. Click the ‘Draw’ tab
3. Click the ‘box’ button and find that it’s chosen the default one and not the one I want so I have to…
4. Click the drop-down next to the styles to find one I’ve saved before in ‘Quick Styles’ noting that after a reboot my quick style has disappeared so I have to…
5. Use the default box and draw it, then click the ‘Outline’ button and choose the red colour I prefer to the default dark red (note that red isn’t in any of the presets)
6. Next click Effects > Shadow > More Shadows so that I can change the default shadow (note that in SnagIt 8 I’d do this once only and it would be remembered for ever more)
7. Click the arrow next to ‘Styles’ to add the current style to ‘Quick Styles’ knowing it’ll be forgotten later
8. Now to draw the arrow I’ll have to go back to point 3, but click the arrow instead of the box button – sigh
9. Ok, time to resize the image, that means clicking the ‘Image’ tab
10. Click Resize > Resize image – pretty much the same as SnagIt 8
11. Now to add the edge effect, as usual it’s forgotten my quick style so I click Edges > Torn Edges and set the values I want (click ‘Add to Quick Styles’ and hope it’s there next time)
12. Save image

Ok, I admit that if they manage to fix the fact that the quick styles keep being lost (and kept in view every time) it’ll make things slightly better, but nevertheless for my workflow – which is nothing special – it would mean a lot of flitting between the ‘Draw’ and ‘Image’ tabs and indeed that’s been the frustration. I love the fact that SnagIt 8 has all the tools you need in one place – changing tabs is like walking into another room and it just slows me down. It’s a real shame as SnagIt 9 has a lot of other cool features like being able to do multiple captures in a row and having a library recording all the snapshots you’ve taken. I gave it a few months to see if I liked it but when I happened to use SnagIt 8 on one of my machines it reminded me how much better it was so I rolled back.

I can see why as a software vendor you’d see the Microsoft Office ribbon and want to put it in your application – if nothing else it looks cool – but it’s easy to forget that the ribbon was designed to handle software containing hundreds of functions such as Word and was laid out with a great deal of care and thought. And while it works well in Word it’s not necessarily of benefit to applications with a couple of dozen functions. In the case of SnagIt it takes a light, quick and simple application and makes it just that little bit less light, quick and simple – which for me has always been its defining strength.

If you don’t take a lot of captures or are happy with all the defaults, then SnagIt 9 may be fine for you. But I’m a bit particular and fussy, so all that new GUI just gets in my way and means I’m better sticking with SnagIt 8. Bah humbug!

Of course, back when podcasting began it wasn’t so cool and I pretty much ignored it (which is what I tend to do with most technical things until they prove themselves capable of making my life better). Initially the only podcasts out there seemed to be recorded by American men droning on in monotone voices about some boring technology or other (or making some interesting technology sound boring as a result of their monotone, droning voices) – which is exactly the last thing I wanted to listen to on the train in the morning. So I steered clear.

But more recently mainstream media, such as the BBC to name but one, have picked up podcasting in a big way. Pretty much every radio show of interest has its own podcast and with the tight integration from software such as iTunes, it’s incredibly easy to subscribe to them. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. Much like getting Sky+ revolutionised the way I watch TV – I “series link” all the things I’d like to see and watch them at a time of my choosing instead of being a slave to the schedules (and as a bonus feature I never have to watch ad breaks) – podcasting now means I don’t have to turn radio 5 on at 11am on a Saturday to listen to Fighting Talk. Instead the next time I hook my iPod up to my Mac the latest episode is automatically copied across and I can listen to it when I want.

As well as audio podcasts there are also video podcasts produced by a variety of people and organisations (even NASA) although personally I prefer not to squint at a small screen while on a train so will stick to audio for now. But as is often the case, something that I thought was a bit of a waste of time when it first came on the scene has grown into a huge success that’s been bought into by most mainstream media companies, not to mention talented individuals who would otherwise not be able to show their skills without getting a job in radio or TV. Still, better late than never!

Oh, and before you ask, no, I have no plans to ever record my own podcasts. I’d just drone on in monotonous tones about my hair, the weather and a whole bunch of other things nobody would ever be interested in. This site does enough of that already!

Like most non-technical people she gets bored of reading technical talk within about 30 seconds. So after a couple of minutes she says the following in a monotone, bored voice, almost sighing as she did: “Dual processor processes power as fast as your imagination… Do I want that?”.

A slogan like that is supposed to be said in a triumphant, confident way, and definitely in bold like Buzz Lightyear saying: “To Infinity And Beyond!”. I’m sure the copywriter who wrote the line about dual processors imagined people reading it and saying “Wow! I want one of them!”. But of course the reality is that most people won’t understand what a dual processor does and if it being “as fast as your imagination” actually matters on not.

A techie like me just ignores it as meaningless marketing spiel (I don’t know which part of their statement to correct first) but I’m sure many people like my good lady just get confused and turned off to technology even more. So much for being consumer focused.