Your software idea will always be better than my software idea because you know your own idea. You understand it. You don’t understand my idea at all. Whenever I have an idea and I explain a cool feature or a new program idea to a person, they don’t normally understand it. It’s not that I’m explaining the problem poorly, the other person just doesn’t get it. Then when that other person tries to explain their idea to me, I don’t get what makes their idea better than mine.
Part of the reason is that with the idea I have, I have a personal interest in not being wrong. I’ve committed time to my idea just thinking about it so thinking that all the time has been wasted thinking about the idea seems like a loss. I’m also pretty sure that if the other person just could understand my idea more, they’d see the light.
When trying to convince someone that your idea is actually a better idea than theirs, follow this rule.
Don’t.
There is a 50/50 chance you’re idea is worse but more importantly, there is an even better chance they don’t understand the idea that you have like you understand your idea. And even if you convince them that your idea is better, they won't ever feel good about admitting it because no one likes to admit they're wrong.
If you’re a programmer trying to explain an idea to a non programmer or more often a non-technical person, I often find non-programmers just can’t seem to wrap their heads around certain topics. They can’t understand why one task is really hard and another is really easy in programming.
Often I'll hear things from people like "Did you hear how much YouTube sold for? You should have built that!" or "This company just got bought out. Why didn't you build something like that?"As soon as I tell them an idea I have for software, they say "Oh, no one would use that. Why don't you build a better search engine?"
But if you have an idea, remember that it doesn’t matter whose idea is better. It just matter who builds their software idea because the idea that actually gets built is always better than the one that doesn’t.
¶ 6:55 PM 0 Comments
Recently while working on File Phantom, I’ve come to the realization that I really don’t think that I’d have finished my software if it wasn’t for my business partner and it’s not that my partner is a programmer. He actually isn’t at all. He’s focusing on the website, marketing, graphic design and other parts of the company. He’s handling a lot of the other tasks but the reason I wouldn’t have finished was because I like having someone to show my latest project to and to keep me on track and unless the person you go to to show your product to is going to get something out of its success, they won’t care.
I started the project around September and was developing it for about a month pretty solidly but I didn’t have a partner. Then I reached a burnout stage on it. I wasn’t feeling motivated to work on the software anymore. It wasn’t progressing that fast because I spent the whole first month working on really cool abstractions in C# and after a month, I wasn’t seeing the progress I wanted to see in it. These abstractions that I was building though have wound up saving me massive amounts of time and headaches.
So after that first month, I really backed off development. I think for about a month I really didn’t look at the code at all. At the time I was also working for Sponsorhouse part time and they were getting ready to launch a new version so there was some extra work on that and then the regular school stuff. I wasn’t really sure if I even believed in the project anymore. I knew my application was going to hide files but what else could it do? I didn’t know and wasn’t thinking about it all that much. Then I stopped working at Sponsorhouse.
At about the same time, I was in touch with Chris Kirkman, this great graphic designer that I knew and we’d done some projects in the past. So I told Chris about File Phantom and he seemed really excited about it so we partnered and at that time File Phantom didn’t have a name so we came up with the name and bought the domain names and started coming up with strategies for what we wanted to do with it. Suddenly, I was energized again to do development. I could do development and then show what I was building to Chris. Before I’d show it to some of my other friends and I could tell they just weren’t that interested in this “file manager program thing” that I was building. If I became really rich off of this product none of my friends would be rich with me as a result so it doesn’t matter to them what my software does. Maybe if it could help them write papers for school they’d be interested but otherwise, it doesn’t benefit them in any way.
As a result of this new energy and having more free time, I started working on File Phantom considerably more. Since I’ve worked in web development, some database development, desktop application development and web services, I was pretty quickly able to build the application and a supporting authentication/payment server setup. It also helped that I had spent the first month just designing the abstractions because when it came time to actually build the UI of the software, all the libraries had already been built which was nice. I just had to plug in functions to the UI parts and see if they worked like I thought they would.
File Phantom is in beta right now and we’re really trying to focus now on the UI, documentation and the website. About 95% of the functionality is there that we need to be in the application and hopefully polish is all that’s left to do before we actually launch the product in January.
But if Chris hadn’t partnered with me to do the project, I doubt it would have made it past the first month of development. It’s a lonely task developing software, especially when you’re the only one that has a vested interest in it. Finding someone to show your software to can often be enough to keep you chugging along even during the times you’re programming your 49th C# property and you’re dreading building the next 15 properties. ¶ 10:38 PM 0 Comments
BUY ULTIMATE
If you buy anything else, about two months, six months, a year down the road, you're going to be let down when you realize that your Windows Vista non-Ultimate doesn't support games or can't do all the cool new media features or lacks some other main feature which is really why you're spending all that money on a new OS anyways.
This is classic economics though. Microsoft segments the market in the hopes of getting every last dollar they can from people. What I think will happen is that because of the confusion of what the SEVEN DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF VISTA really do, people are going to end up having to buy even more expensive upgrades to the next version.
So the simple solution is just to get the Ultimate version no matter how over priced it may be. ¶ 8:00 PM 0 Comments
So, why not just use Guids? I'm going to be authenticating the registration key against a database anyways. ¶ 7:33 PM 0 Comments
My work around wound up being to create a page dedicated to the little form button they wanted on the page. Wasn't the optimal solution but it worked.
Maybe this isn't something people do very often but it seemed like quite a pain to get this payment process working. I know ASP.NET and C# fairly well and I had some trouble getting it going. Probably took about 10 hours although some of that time was working on hooking it all up to a database for reporting. I'd also never looked at any of their API sets before but it was still a pain.
Their C# example for the C# Asp.NET example also only seemed to show about a quarter of the steps that were nessecary.
If you're doing this yourself as well, you'll need these links.
https://www.paypal.com/en_US/pdf/PP_OrderManagement_IntegrationGuide.pdf
http://forums.asp.net/thread/92314.aspx
Labels: filephantom software C# programming asp asp.net
¶ 12:08 AM 0 Comments
This is the website for it.
Chris Kirkman and I just built the site tonight. He's a great graphic designer. We're partnering on this project so that I can continue to focus on writing code and he can focus on making an awesome UI experience.
If you have any comments on it, let me know. ¶ 12:13 AM 0 Comments
I installed Windows Vista RC1 last night onto one of my computers so that I could set it up as my primary gaming PC and come to find out, the driver support really isn't there yet for Vista. It's like 99% there but Nvidia doesn't have great drivers so it pretty much killed my attempts at trying to play games today so now I'm reinstalling Windows XP with a fresh install and I'm going to keep games on the system from now on. No other software so that I can maintain performance.
I was really impressed with how fast Vista found all the drivers for my system by itself though.
¶ 4:17 PM 0 Comments
