Island Web Works

I do try and maintain an open mind, it is something that I am particularly keen on, however, I was stopped dead in my tracks recently when I undertook a survey on the http://glassbooth.org/ questionnaire, that claims to match your beliefs and desires with the most appropriate political party/candidate.

The party I favoured was highlighted as the worse match, the party I regarded as the least relevant was the best match, and the party I hold in the upmost contempt was only very slightly less compatible - achieving 2nd place.

What was gained from this experience? Well as I don’t have a vote in the UK, the favoured party will not receive any benefit of my new wisdom, however, it did make me realise that no matter how open minded we think we are, no matter how receptive to new ideas, at some point we can find ourselves taking a stand on something that proves to be of little relevance or purely a subjective point of view.

Sometimes, what we think we want turns out to be the opposite of what we actually need. Take the test, I am sure it will surprise a few of you.

Charles Uncategorized

Google Latitude: I know it looks like I'm traveling on Quarterbridge Road, I'm actually at work in Circular Road. Honest!

The other day one of my colleagues misplaced his mobile phone.  He went through the same procedure we all go through: checking his pockets, his desk, his car and his home, dialing his mobile number to see if he could hear it ringing.  He also tried to backtrack were he’d been that day to figure out where he could have left it.  In the end it turned up safely, tucked behind a sofa cushion, but it got me thinking: isn’t there an application that would be able to track where your phone is?  And display it on a map on a web page for you to see?

Last year, Google released Latitude - part of the Google maps for your phone. Although I’ve had Google maps on my Nokia for some time now, I’ve never gotten around to try out the Latitude service, but the incident with my colleagues phone triggered a revisit.

Said and done. I fired up Google Maps on my Nokia phone and activated the Latitude feature, and was greeted by a login prompt.  Obviously, you’ll need to have an Google account to use their Latitude service, so I tried to log in using my account details.  Several failed attempts later my account had been locked.  I double checked my login details by logging in on my desktop PC, which oddly enough worked flawlessly.  45 frustrating minutes later  (which included trying to set up a new account and then realising I already had a gmail account from years back) I was up and running.

Now, my phone is equipped with a GPS sat-nav chip so it will try to connect with outer space to verify my position, but even if it doesn’t (or the reception is poor) Google Maps and Latitude will use the mobile phone signal to triangulate your approximate position.  And sure enough, after a few minutes I could track my phone’s position on the Google Latitude map in my desktop browser.

So, does it work?  Yes, in so far as your phone will be tracked and shown on a map - both in your desktop browser and on your phone itself.  It also has the added feature of adding friends to be able to track their whereabouts in relation to your own.  A history list of locations is also stored for you to review.

But, at least for me, it doesn’t work particulary reliably. It’s constantly showing my phone to be several miles from where it actually is, or just as ‘Somewhere in the Douglas area’.  That’s not going to help me find my phone!  In the end, I opted to disable Latitude for the simple reason that it was constantly connecting to the network with annoying inteference noises in any closeby speakers or headphones. Also, it was running my battery to the ground.

For now, I’ll just have to rely on the old proven methods mentioned earlier to find my lost phone - the future is getting closer, but it’s not quite here yet.

Andreas Uncategorized Geo tagging, Google Latitude, Mobile phone

We calculated recently that in recent years, based on the number of licensed MIGTurbo users (divided by 4 multiplied by 5 days per week - less holidays and bank holidays, on the basis of 3 hours use per working day); MIGTurbo has exceeded 1.5 Million hours of real world user testing.  If we play with the figures slightly it quickly approaches 10+ million, but we have always been a tad conservative!

It’s quite ‘gob smacking’ when you work out the figures just how extensively our MIGTurbo CRM software is used. We were so proud of the fact that many of the current features have either been requested or suggested by our user base - we considered starting a marketing campaign based upon the notion that our clients ‘invented that’ - unfortunately another software company appears to have recently used that idea!

I think the answer to my question is there can never be enough testing just insufficient time!

Charles Uncategorized

They always come in three’s, why is that?

The week started with a power outage, Monday morning was not good for many businesses.

Tuesday I had  mobile phone issues, darn thing kept switching itself off, and if that wasn’t bad enough, disabling the answer service in the process. Anyway, nice lady in the phone shop exchanged it. Following day I took it back, the replacement kept switching itself off. Nice lady in the phone shop replaced it for a different model, really, really good customer service, although, I suspect it may have been a case of just getting me out of the shop ! lol.

Yesterday we had a problem with our internal system, running extremely sloooowly in IE 8. Anyway, after isolating and discounting every step in the chain between server and workstation(s) we concluded the network card had been zapped during Mondays power outage. 9 pm Thursday evening after restoring back up arrays and replacing network cards we concluded the DNS must have become corrupt. In a last ditch attempt to find an alternative cause we discovered that an Anti Virus update to the browser plugin was the culprit… extremely annoying since we had (we thought) disabled the AV in the earliest stage of our diagnosis.

Friday I received an updated preview on our new MIGTurbo 2.0 Rich Internet Application interface (RIA), and the clouds parted and all was good with the world once more. Ahh! isn’t it good to end the week on a high note!

Charles Uncategorized

Following on from my last post (aka rant), I have been upsetting people internally by translating many of the superb new developments in the MIGTurbo 2.0 security profile into real world application.

I kept finding myself being hit by statements such as ‘client groups do not define security policy’ and ‘once assigned a role becomes a policy’, to which I usually retort,’ I am a user, why do I care!’. Whilst churlish, it does help frame matters from a users perspective – does it matter!, so what if you can lock access down to 3 decimal places if the system becomes unusable.

It is so easy to lose sight of usability in a mêlée of functions and features. I am pleased therefore to report, both security and usability appear to be capably accommodated in my first preview of the all new MIGTurbo 2.0 development.

Charles Uncategorized

Whilst I should not be surprised, I am! Who drives ‘innovation’ in today’s software products! To me, the latest version of Microsoft Office is unrecogniseable compared to 2003, everything I want from the menu system has moved or worse, simply does not exist any more. How does a company become so arrogant or out of touch with its users! Functions that I have used everyday for years no longer exist.  My latest realisation is that I cannot save documents to my C:\ drive, apparently it is a security threat. I can copy the file to my desktop and then to my c:\ drive but not to my c:\ drive directly. It’s a bit like saying you cannot buy cigarettes because you are too young, however we will sell you tobacco and cigarette paper separately.

I must be getting old, I used to revel in technology, eagerly awaiting each new release and often feeling let down because the raft of new functions were superficial and of no real significance. Now I feel let down because each function is wrapped in so much ‘cotton wool’ by the time I have managed to get to the function, I have forgotten what I wanted to do in the first place.

Charles Uncategorized Office 2007, Office 2010

The last couple of weeks we’ve been using the beta version of MIGTurbo 1.9  in the office - trying out new features and hunting down bugs. 

I always find it interesting to see a product go from development to a ‘live’ test environment and with this release it’s been no different.  After a few days testing we had a rather substantial list of (albeit minor) bugs to go through.  In addition to the typical ‘but why would anyone do that?’-bugs, there were also a good few interesting suggestions on how to improve the user interface. 

With version 1.9 we’re trying to both move MIGTurbo forward with some exciting new features whilst at the same time keep all the existing users happy with the familiar environment they said they liked.  In fact, with the default settings you’d be hard pushed to see any immediate changes at all.  Sure, the branding has changed slightly, and there are a few minor layout differences, but in essence it’s still good old MIGTurbo!

Regarding the new features, I think the one that will excite people most will be the customisable tab layout.  In 1.9 every user can have their own personalised layout, giving the administrator the option to optimise MIGTurbo for different types of work tasks.  Another great new feature is the Firefox browser support.  Until now MIGTurbo has always been a Microsoft-centric software, and although that’s still true ‘under the hood’ we are now inviting non-Windows users for the first time - great news for Apple fans!

We’ve now swatted all known bugs but will keep running it in beta for the next week just to be sure. If all goes well we are aiming to go gold on Friday 13th!

Andreas MIGTurbo, Uncategorized MIGTurbo 1.9

It seems like fate, just when you get onto the topic of something you really believe in, it appears everyone conspires to really emphasise why you believe what you believe. We are a regular user of a remote desktop service application. Fantastic product, works, doesn’t require weekly updates, doesn’t require you to re-learn the user interface every week (unlike some on-line presentation software we USED to use), really great product. Yesterday, my opinion changed, they have just released their latest version, the interface is as black as polished ebony, and quite frankly, is depressing to use. What I really want to know is who gets the final say on what the user (or paying customer) really wants! From my recent experience it appears anyone but the users themselves.

In software development, (assuming the software meets the client’s business requirements), the UX should be king, long live the UX!

Charles Uncategorized

How do you advance a technology or product when the tools you use are deprecated and the new ones are…. well in some ways, not as good!

I read somewhere that technology reaches it’s zenith just before it becomes obsolete, examples that spring to mind are the old vacuum flourecent displays used on typewriters, replaced by CRT displays, replaced by LCD displays which in turn will soon be replaced by OLED displays.

We are soon to release our MIGTurbo 1.9 revision of  our award winning CRM software, this will be the last revision of a product based upon Microsoft ASP technology, which has proven to be incredibly fast and easy to use. The next revision (version 2.0) will be based on .NETand AJAX. Whilst this is an essential milestone on our development road map, it presents a number of design ‘considerations’ that were not presented in ASP.

Sometimes ‘keeping it simple’, is not as easy as we would like.

Charles Uncategorized

For my first (ever) blog I thought some background may be a good idea.  In 2001 we started up a web design business with great ideas about becoming internet zillionaires…. well pay the mortgage at least, but after 6 months we realised that the local market was too small to achieve this in web design alone. So we re-focused ourselves on software development and in the process built an Award Winning CRM software called MIGTurbo. Since 2001 we have produced many different software products (and web sites) for clients, and now have well over 100 clients locally.

At the outset we set ourselves one simple goal; do the best we can and keep our promises, which judging by the number of clients we continue to do business with is obviously a good approach. We now focus on CRM & BPR (Business Proces Re-engineering) projects and are represented in the UK and Channel Islands via a number of resellers who re-sell our MIGTurbo software.

When we started off there were 2 of us, now there are 6 of us and we will probably need to take on another couple of people within the next 12 months.

The reason for my title.. well when we started, like most new businesses we were happy to get any business just to keep busy - now, however, with several projects usually on the go at any one time, oh how I miss those early days.

Charles Uncategorized