Archive for category Tools
More evaluation and meetings
I got some quite passionate feedback on my latest frowning on capturing feedback for internal trainings. In short, the reaction was that there are some obvious advantages to gain in capturing feedback, nothing to lose, and I didn’t really show a lot of innovative spirit. My main claim was that creating and evaluating the feedback materials could easily become a waste of time because participants would not be motivated to return feedback.
The key is to make giving feedback compelling, fun, and fast. Only ask one or two simple questions like:
What was the most useful thing you learned in this session?
If you could change one thing for the next group of participants for this session, what would it be?
What were you expecting that you did not get from the session?
And then, you can do better than filling out paper. Using an online tool lets your participants give their feedback when they are ready for it – and that is probably not directly after the session when everyone is rushing out for lunch or a few beers, but later in the hotel room or via their smartphone. And of course, an online tool does not pile up on your desk in an untidy fashion (yes, I’m the kind of person whose desk is always a mess).
I stumbled across a new thing called BetterMe - its primary focus is on personal feedback, but it works perfectly for a serious of sessions. BetterMe lets you send out questions, and a (predefined) set of ratings to a group of people, who then receive an invitation to come in and provide anonymous feedback. Well yeah, there are drawbacks – the rating questions can only be chosen from a small predefined set, you need to log on to provide feedback, support for small device isn’t great. But BetterMe really shines as a personal tool for accepting and giving feedback, in a professional or personal frame. (OK, the templates for personal questions are a little weird: How am I in bed – rate 1-10). You can try this out on me: go to BetterMe, create a login, and send some feedback to chr.heger@gmail.com.
And then there’s Ketchup. Ketchup is a minimalistic planning tool for meetings, and very much focused on exactly that. You start by creating a meeting in Ketchup, invite some people (Ketchup sends out the invitations), and share the URL of public meetings. Then when the meeting is on the way or over you can add some notes. The whole meeting can be printed nicely, and there are decent export features into calendars. Ketchup does nothing that you could not do with your Outlook or Google Calendar, but it provides a very streamlined and concentrated user interface.
Finally, a visit on MeetOrDie can saves you the effort of actually running a meeting at all, as it precisely predicts the outcome of a meeting.
Free NUnit integration for Visual Studio
It’s been around for half a year now, but I totally missed that there is a free&open tool out there that lets you run NUnit tests from within Visual Studio. The thing is called Visual NUnit (documentation and download available from that link). It does exactly what it promises to do – run NUnit tests from within Visual Studio, and debug without attaching the debugger to NUnit first, and that’s it – and performs very solidly; I’ve tested it with VS2008 with a 2000+ test suite, and with the RC of VS2010 (but not with that many tests).
No hard feelings, but I always thought that the price tag for TestDriven.Net was a little over the top; maybe worth paying, but not worth the fight of getting the budget for.
Thanks Tommi Laukkanen for putting this together! (And BTW, there another Tommi Laukkanen who’s made the mobile Twitter app Twim that I use on the e71. But they’re not the same).
Wednesday Morning Rant
It’s early, it’s raining, the conductor just told me the trains won’t be running tomorrow, but I’m fine because I can cool my temper venting about:
Steam.
Yesterday on the train home I fired up Machinarium (an awesome and stylish puzzle-solving game). The only problem with it is that you can get it on Steam.
Now instead of just starting the game, Steam told me it couldn’t because I thought it urgently needed to phone home and tell the guys at Valve about what I did yesterday (or whatever it does), but that’s OK, I’d love to exchange a little privacy for the opportunity to buy games without having to wait for the DVDs to arrive (especially because the laptop does not have a drive). So I plugged in the 3G stick and learned that what Steam really wanted to do was to update itself. After some train stations of watching the progress bar slowly creep to the 20% mark it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be finished until I got home, and would have churned away half my data plan. Now really. 30+ MB for starting a game that I’ve already got installed?
eBay.
I’ve received a friendly e-mail from them that since I’ve sold less than 50 items of stuff over the years, I’d have to offer PayPal for each of my future auctions. I know I have a PayPal account, but it must have fallen behind the book shelf or book taken out by the dog; in any case, it’s in disuse since years. And the experiences with it weren’t that great that I’d say I miss it. For the odd toy or spare electronics parts that I used to sell I just won’t bother revitalizing may PayPal account or creating a new one. In addition, I find it interesting that eBay actually rises the bar for new potential sellers – I’m not sure if that serves them. Well I am. It won’t.
More fun with…
Here’s the recent top three applications that brought some light into my dim existence:
Feedly
Feedly takes the RSS feeds you’ve collected via Google Reader* and shows them as a nicely formatted web page. On its landing page, you see abstracts of new articles from several posts. To organize larger collections, you can assign tags that render into an own page – e.g. one for comics, one for your friends blogs, one for Silverlight news… On top, there’s a ranking engine in the background that prioritizes popular articles. Feedly installs as a browser extension for Firefox and Chrome 4 that lets you add feed sources, re-blog content, and some more (all of which I don’t use).
For me, Feedly has turned reading the daily RSS flood from a task to a pleasure. I had grown reluctant to adding RSS feeds because I could hardly keep up with the ones I had. Feedly makes it easier to scan new content in a few glimpses.
Feedly also creates a strong feeling of “Gosh-why-didn’t-I-have-that-idea”.
*(… into which you can import OPML files if you’d like to use Feedly)
Dropbox
Dropbox is a file sharing/backup tool. I use it for file sharing, publishing, and for syncing stuff between the different computers I use. It now supports syncing between computers that are linked to the same Dropbox account directly, without having to upload the files to their service and back down. This makes transferring files between your own computers a lot faster (as long as you’re on the same network), and also allows transferring files without even being connected to the Internet at all.
Dropbox let users vote for features, and if they take it seriously, it will at some point in time let you decide which files to sync to which computer. I’d love to see that: it’d allow me to backup my music and video library to the online store and and it would not sync back to my company notebook.
Backupify
Backupify provides backup for things that belong to you, but reside somewhere in the cloud: your e-mails in GMail, your Twitter tweets, you Blogger or WordPress blog, docs in Google Docs, photos in Flickr, you name it.
Backupify is not yet without problems. The GMail backup is struggling against being locked out due to assumed over-utilization of Google’s IMAP server, and the UI is less than super-appealing. Another criticism you can hold against Backupify is that you do not really take ownership of your bytes, they are just moved from one cloud service to another, and the risks that apply to this kind of service still apply, especially because Backupify uses the Amazon S3 infrastructure, and a failure within S3 could affect the thing that you are updating and the backup at the same time. On the other hand, it’s a lot better than no backup at all, or the new year’s resolution to download everything manually and store on DVD that you don’t act on.
Expressing some love for mindmaps
The smarter people amongst us may have found out ages ago: Mindmaps are just great.
I lived through my own private mindmap-epiphany when I saw a consultant taking notes from a day-long meeting in the form of a mindmap: he actually produced something that had structure, captured all the necessary content, and even had presentable style. My own notes kind of fell apart when the discussion was meandering from topic A to topic B, coming back to A via C, D, E, F to M, and Y.
Following that experience, I tried to use maps for taking notes during meetings, interviews, and as the first phase for writing documents, and for me, it flows very naturally. The main improvement is that structure comes by itself. You may find that a branch of ideas belongs somewhere else, and just push it over: mindmaps support refactoring.
I currently use FreeMind - it’s free, works well enough, and uses a very simple XML document format that can easily be transformed into something else if necessary.
The remaining problem is that I need to type on your laptop, which gives the people I talk with the uneasy feeling that I’m just checking my e-mail or tweeting or whatever I might do. Would someone get me a big tablet, please?
Backblaze: not so blazing
I’ve tried the online backup service Backblaze now for the second time, with less than satisfying results. Backblaze offers unlimited online backup capacity for one computer for 5$ a month (that’s less than 4€ for lucky Europeans like myself), and they give you a two-weeks trial period.
The first try was on my own laptop. There were about 30 GB to back up, most of it being my iTunes library. A problem was that I take that computer to where I am most of the time, and most of my time is not within the reach of a free, high-speed network link. So it turned out that after 12 days, it has only backed up about 1GB.
The next try was on my wife’s laptop. Here we had about 45 GB, including two largish iTunes libraries and a lot of photos. That computer rarely leaves home, so it is continually connected to a DSL line with 512kBit/s upstream rate. I told everyone to keep the machine running, et voila…. after 11 days, there were 43 GB remaining.
It could well be the case that Backblaze has just has bad connectivity into Europe. I don’t blame them for too low bandwidth. What I blame them for is this:
After 11 of 14 days of the trial period, it becomes clear that this won’t work. Less than 5% of data have been transferred. Yet, they send out a mail telling you that the initial backup is going to take just 1 or two more weeks, you’ll be fine, and you need to subscribe to their service NOW, or otherwise ally the transferred data will be deleted – well yeah, if only there was so much of it. I would have really appreciated seeing a piece of communication from them that states that this is not going to work.
UPDATE:
I’ve now got a paid 50GB plan with Dropbox. As a backup solution, it’s got some drawbacks – you need to put files you want to backup into a special folder, mainly (which is OK for me as I primarily want to backup my music, code, and photos, and don’t care about the system-restore kind of backup). Uploading 30GB of stuff has only taken a week now because of the limits of my DSL line.
Google Wave: It’s for Apps
I think a so far underhyped aspect of Google Wave is that it has huge potential for integration of communication and applications – and applications does not mean Twitter or a blog engine this time, but brick-and-mortar LOB enterprise applications.
A reoccurring use case is that people want to be updated when things are happening within their little business kingdom, and to have a way to directly react without having to leave the context of the communication application they’re currently working with. Today, you see this demand normally satisfied by an Outlook plug-in, or some awkward e-mail parsing.
Wave offers a much more elegant solution. It offers two important extensibility features:
- Robots. Server-side application modules can take part in a Wave, and create new ones. This is the technology that enables the Twitter and Blogger integration shown in the demos.
- Gadgets. A gadget is a client-side piece of user interface that provides data visualization and manipulation other than text – you see examples for this in the Yes/No/Maybe or Maps gadgets.
Via a robot, the application can create new wave messages, and react to changes in its content. Using a gadget, the application can provide a structured visualization for data, and more importantly: a structured way for the user to provide feedback, that does not require parsing text.
For example, a manager at a bike shop could be informed by a wave if the stock of spokes is below the critical level. The wave includes a gadget that includes a “Order new spokes” button. When the manager clicks the button, the gadget changes the content of the wave, the robot catches that change, and informs the ERP solution to get moving.
I think we’ll see a lot of great deal of things like that once Wave becomes ready for business – and that’s probably not before there are implementations of Wave not owned and run by Google. But that’s another story.
Hey Dropbox, what about this?
I’m extremely fond of Dropbox. If you don’t know it yet: it’s cloud storage made extremely easy. You get 2GB free, and more on a subscription basis. You’ll want to use once you’ve tried. They’ve also got a very seductive marketing tool: you get 250MB extra for each new customer you invite. So if you want to try Dropbox, this is the best link to use, because it adds them to my account. It’s not like they’ve got me hooked on that or so.
I’m missing a feature though: I want to be able to download files from somewhere directly into my Dropbox (or Skydrive, or other cloud storage). Reason number one is my DSL line: 6MBit down, His Trickling Snailness up. To get something into the box, I need to first download it and then wait for quite a time until it’s up. It would be so much greater if I could just instruct some cloud service to get the file at that URL and directly shove it into the box, and then have it downloaded onto my computer when it syncs.
Reason number two is that I might want to download stuff, but not on the computer or phone I’m on. For example, when I’m at work. When I’m using my phone. Or when I use my laptop on 3G. What I currently do is drop the URL into Evernote – not bad either, but I’d like it better to just have the file downloaded immediately, and then receive it when I’m on a fast and cheap network.
So what do we need?
- A server app that you pass a URL and your DropBox account. It downloads the file and uploads it to Dropbox.
- For more convenience, a client app that can store your credentials, and that can sit in the tray, watch the clipboard, or be a Firefox extension.
I don’t know if I’d do an iPhone app – it should be OK when the web app lends itself to that form factor.
And it would be good for Dropbox too. They just loose money on people like me (I’ve currently got about 500MB in the box). They’d be much happier if I got above my limit for the free account – and I would absolutely pay the 10$ per month. The easier it is for me to get stuff into the box, the easier I’d be tempted to reach the critical limit between free and paid.
UPDATE: Dropbox have done The Smart Thing for feature requests and let you vote for your favorite feature. If you like the idea, please vote here:
https://www.dropbox.com/votebox/817/right-click-download-to-my-dropbox
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