Either You Succeed or Explain

How strongly does Google believe in web applications?

I recently started advertising my product with Google Adwords. Advertising is Google's main source of income, so it is not taken lightly. It's a very complex operation which is immensely flexible and powerful. When I started using it, I noticed that they provide a desktop application for controlling your Adwords campaign, which works alongside the web interface.

I wonder why?  If you look at their FAQ, you'll see that it provides greater functionality. Functions such as copying/moving ads, changing multiple items at once and working off-line are a breeze in the desktop editor. 

What's up, Google?  On one hand, you do your best to announce the death of desktop applications. On the other hand, when it comes to your most important business, you admit that the web interface is just not rich enough.

About two weeks ago, I attended the first Israeli Google Developers Day. It was fun, well organized, highly technical and overall an interesting event. I recall that all the presenters were using Microsoft PowerPoint for their presentations (most guests had Macs, but that's a different story). Why not Google Docs?  

Microsoft just announced that it's going to compete with Google Docs and produce an online version of Microsoft Office. I'm saying: it's a great for PR. Practically speaking, they can continue to bask in the desktop office glory.

 

Professional FAIL

Something light I just came across. I was Googling something and came across this Google Ad. It is in Hebrew. The title reads "Professional Optimization for Network" and the company claims to be expert in Google optimization. The only problem is that "professional" is misspelled... How unprofessional can you be?  They're so professional with Google technologies, they can't even spell check a 25 character ad title.

This would make a great entry in the FAIL blog if it wasn't in Hebrew.

A problem with two very different solutions

For some reason, I came across too many articles lately dealing with Windows boot time and improving it either by hardware or by software.

You know, I'm usually not dragged into the holy war of which OS is better, but the current uptime (time since last boot) of my MacBook Pro is 22 days and that's not unusual. I boot it from two main reasons: OS updates which require a restart and for starting my machine in Windows mode via Bootcamp. I used to do that just to play some games, for other purposes VMWare Fusion is a great solution. I don't do that nowadays, mostly because I don't have time for that and also because I finally upgraded my home Windows machine to an acceptable level.

For me, it's not uncommon to run a month without a restart. I put my laptop to sleep, wake it up in the morning and start working after a few seconds. BTW, boot time is seriously quick on my laptop... but I don't really recall... :-)

So there you have it: two very different solutions to the same problem. Apple makes it unnecessary to boot your machine and Microsoft... well, third parties are providing solutions to problems created by Microsoft in the first place. 

PS. Just for the record, I load tons of extensions at startup. As evidence, I give you my menu-bar.

Introducing nWire

The time has come to raise the curtain on the project I've been working on for the past year (or so). Drumroll please... welcome to nWire. nWire is the name of my product. The company is called nWire Software. To learn more, please visit my site at: www.nwiresoftware.com.

nWire is an of Eclipse plug-ins which expedites Java development by assisting the developer in navigating through the code and understanding it. The initial version of nWire consists of 3 main tools:  

• The navigator: presents  all the system components and associations in a dynamic column view.
• Navigator search: incremental search for every component in the system.
• The visualizer: presents the components and associations graphically.

By component I refer to classes, interfaces, methods, etc., while Associations may be extension of classes, implementation of interfaces, method invocation, field access, etc. There are a number of features in nWire, which are more than what you get from Eclipse today, like search as you type for methods and fields. The navigator presents information which can be found in various tools today, but the big difference is that it gathers all the information into one single view which is, in my opinion, very easy to use.

I have a screencast which explains these main features, so be sure to check it out (in the main page click on watch). You can also check out the screenshots which explain what it means. 

I have big plans for nWire. I believe it provides great value today. More value will come from aggregating information from various frameworks and languages into a single tool. Soon there will be support for Spring Framework and other frameworks and languages will follow. Later down the road, you'll be able to add your own self-tailored frameworks as well. You can read more about the concept and road-map here. 

nWire is currently in private beta. Today I installed it in the first customer beta-site. The first site is about 10 minutes drive from my office, which allows me to provide close support and get better feedback. I will be sending out beta invitations in 2 weeks, so be sure to register if you'd like to participate. 

From now, I'll be blogging on the nWire blog as well and I invite you to register to the feed for updates.

Don't forget to send me any feedback you may have (either by mail, or using my feedback form). Let me know what you think about the site, about the new product and register to participate in my beta.

Launching my site tomorrow

My site is finally up and running. It was a lot of hard work and I'm very proud of the results. Sure, it is far from being the most polished site you've seen, but it's aesthetic, it looks professional enough and it delivers the message. I had a lot of fun working on the site and it really developed my appetite for doing more web hacking. I will blog about it in the near future: although I'm not an expert on the subject, I did travel a beaten path and I want to share my experience and choices.

Tomorrow I'm going to launch my site in this blog. Some of my friends already got the link and I got some very useful initial feedback. So, expect a post tomorrow with a link to my site. As a teaser, I'm providing this screenshot which is intentionally blurry... :-)

Another important launch tomorrow is my first beta site. It is a local site with friendly users. It is the first time my software gets tested outside and that's also a big event. 

This is truly a time of "Succeed or Explain".