Choosing the tools for your small ISV application

Getting started with your own software company

How the SUV ran over automotive safety

Is bigger better?

iCapture

“iCapture is a great tool for Windows-based web developers who don’t have access to a Mac. Just enter a URL and wait 30 seconds to see a screenshot of that URL as seen in Safari” – Nick Bradbury

Personal enounters with George W. Bush

If George W. Bush could spend 25 minutes chatting with everybody in America like he did with me and five other folks today, he would win any election by a landslide.
[via Scripting News]

Churchgoer describes his encounter with Bush at church

President and Mrs. Bush helped hand out Christmas presents to children of inmates.
Photograph shows President Bush jogging with a serviceman who lost a leg in Afghanistan

Social Networking is about serendipity not persistence

Practical Networking: Make Your Own Luck [Via Jan]

Detailed recaps of T.V. Shows

Television Without Pity. I particularly liked The Apprentice recap

Bank moving away from web based app

 U.K. bank sees browserless future. [via Scoble]

Today, Egg is primarily Web-based,” said Chief Information Officer Tom Llube, addressing the Developing Software for the Future Microsoft Platform conference at London’s QEII Conference Centre this week. “But going forward, we will have to move it to smart-client-based solution.”

But, he said, the bank will move away from the current “one size fits all” model to having a range of services suited to different types of users. “So, if I have a critical mass of users on Longhorn who expect a different class of experience, we will cater for them, but we would support the others

When in doubt, ignore LongHorn

Thank you Chris, for that practical advice

Priorities determine choice of development platform

This sure seems to be an arguement against web-based applications: The IE Factor

It depends what your priorities are. Rich client apps have it’s benefits and shortfalls as does web-apps.

The promise of having one “code” base (HTML, Javascript, CSS files) isn’t a true reality when you have to jump through hoops to create common “code” that all browsers on all platforms will like. This is trial-and-error programming. Perhaps it’s still better than writing multiple client apps for each platform; again, if your priority is to have a product on multiple platforms.

When the time comes that Windows does not garner 90% of the user market and home users are spread more evenly across various platforms, the economics will devalue the choice to only develop windows-based client apps. But not today.

Should standards compliance be a goal not a requirement?

Web standards: practice what you preach?
I’m not so sure. If you say you follow a set of rules, then you shouldn’t be allowed to break the rules when it stops being “convenient”. Especially when there are alternatives within the rules that work.
Would you consider laws a goal not a requirement? Are speed limits a “goal”?

If the rules stop working then we should change the rules by the established processes.

Update:
I asked a friend (non-blogger), who is a deeper thinker than I his opinion, and this is the thread that ensued:

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