Amasan - Common sense 2.0 » software

Youtube Dreamweaver CS3 Tips

Sander — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:38:42 +0000

Brian Wood presents an excellent Dreamweaver tips video on Youtube. Many people just use DW as a text-editor but it’s capable of a lot more even in code view. The following video might open your eyes:

<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/div>";" alt="">

Very nice.

Recommended: Instapaper

Sander — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 09:50:30 +0000

I’d like to start recommending webservices and software that I use frequently. Any product recommended has been evaluated for at least several weeks. In today’s recommended we feature Instapaper. (Recommendation articles are personal opinions with no benefit for the author)

What does Instapaper do? Instapaper facilitates easy reading of long text content.

We discover web content throughout the day, and sometimes, we don’t have time to read long articles right when we find them.

Instapaper allows you to easily save them for later, when you do have time, so you don’t just forget about them or skim through them.

http://www.instapaper.com/

It should be free?

Sander — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 09:47:19 +0000

Should simple software be free:

During the chat, the entire MacBreak Weekly crew discussed the danger to the music industry that comes from younger listeners having a built-in expectation that music should be free.
On this episode I believe [Leo Laporte] has inadvertently helped to perpetuate the same kind of thinking about software that the panel had just finished expressing concern about with regard to music: the idea that the hard-earned fruits of somebody’s creative labor should be free.

http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/481/it-should-be-free

AltTabFingertips

Sander — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:43:44 +0000

What it does
I made a small AHK script I thought you might want to use: AltTab Fingertips. Press a configurable hotkey (F10 by default), and get a menu at the mouse with all the current windows on it. You can exclude processes using the tray menu.

Many thanks to ak_ for creating “menu at cursor” idea with FileDraft, which inspired this. It’s like alt-tab but quicker. A lot of code comes from my PutAside script.

Small screencast:

Changelog:
v1.3 – Recompile, shiny new icon, INI in the same folder as the script for portability!
v1.2 – startup message is now only shown once. Added “show desktop|restore programs” option to menu, (windows-d)
v1.1 – allows to exclude processes via system tray menu.

Download the latest version

Comments are welcome either here or on the related Donationcoder thread.

No-one knows the value of software but let’s not guess

Sander — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:47:16 +0000

It’s impossible to know if software is worth the asking price, even if it’s free, if you haven’t used it. Value of software only becomes apparent over time. It takes time to evaluate and learn the software, to manage your information with it, and to fit it in your workflow. Only after that you know how valuable the software is to you. So how much should you pay the next time you hit that buy button?

Well that depends how much the developers are asking for it of course. And they’re guessing as much as you do. They can prize their product out of the market, by being too expensive. Or they might prize it so low that you think it isn’t up to the task. They might not tell you the price at all and have you call their ‘representatives’. They might give it away for free!

And God help you if an A-list blogger finds out that your premium printer is identical to the cheap printer, with the speed inhibitor turned off. Joel Spolsky

ANY price SOFTWARE bring its own problems

So recently there seems to be a trend to allow customers to set their own price for the latest audio-cd or software package. If you want to pay £1 for it, that’s fine. If you think it deserves £100, that’s ok too. That’s a very brave move on the part of the creators and I have respect for that. It must be hard to hand over the responsibility of valuing your software to people who do have no idea about the value.

As for letting people name the price they pay for the album, he said “It’s fun to make people stop for a few seconds and think about what music is worth, that’s just an interesting question to ask people.”

But I have no idea how much more valuable the latest operating system is before I use it. Especially not if one variety is available for free and another costs me my monthly salary. How much money would you be prepared to pay for an iPhone for example? Other people paid $200 less, are you still happy?

Don’t worry be happy

So it’s almost impossible to value software, and nobody really knows how much it’s worth. This only leaves us with two other options that I have not explored: donationware and software-as-a-service (SAAS). Use the software for an amount of time and decide how much money it’s worth to you. And then just make the most of it.