Namechange

We are thinking of changing the name of our company from Sevensteps to 7-Steps. Not a big change, but to see what it would look like in documentation, I will try it out for some time on this blog.

Bye,
Bart

Update: I reversed the title of the blog (and other general info). It probably won't be 7-Steps. Maybe not a change in name at all... We'll keep on thinking

Investements in hardware - continued...

In one of my postings I wrote about investing in hardware. Sometimes this involves a lot of money (computers, beamers, et cetera). Sometimes the investment is small but the gain is large.

Last week we bought a couple of pcmcia Gigabit network cards for our portables. For EUR 25 per card our networks speed increased 10 times! Now, that's value for money :-)

We are currently looking at a new fibernetwork that is being rolled out in our neighbourhood. For a mere 350 euro / month we would get a 1Gb network connection.... That would mean 100x our current upload speed... I canb hardly wait; working at home using a remote connection would be so much more comfortable...

Bye,
Bart

When do you decide to do a redesign of your software?

I'm working like hell right now on the implementation of a new feature of our software in oder to support flow charts. With the flow charts, and accompanying editors and publication engine plugins, an author can add flow charts to describe a business process, work flows and stuff alike.

The flow charts are, in the tradition of the Sevensteps approach, object oriented and stripped from whatever visual markup that could be there. If you want a green flow chart element: fine. But, first create a style for that and apply it to the flow chart object. Want a italic text? Sure, but change the style to do that.

This approach enables us to have a true single source system and reusable content objects in our CMS-es. But, yesterday I was working on the styles editor and the flow charts editors and found a flaw in my design. The handling of actually applying the styles was programmed in the style editor, instead of in the flow chart object. Although the style editor worked beautifully, I realised my mistake when working on applying the styles for the actual flow chart objects. I found myself reimplementing the same code again.

Although I am under enormous time pressure, I decided to change that implementation and moved the code for applying styles to the place where it belongs: the flow chart objects.

It all took another day of my available time for all this (and I am running out of time already), but I am assured to know that later on I will be glad I did it. Right now it feels like time wasted, but I know better than that :-)

I have one rule that I don't move away from, no matter what: if you decide to do something, do it right, or don't do it. If you do it wrong, and - worse - if you know that it's wrong, it will bite you later on. It might take a day, a week, a year: you will regret it.

So, the answer to the question is: you do a redesign if you know that it's wrong. Don't change it and it will haunt you. Do it over again, and you'll be happy in the end.

Bye,
Bart

Upgrading user interface

In the upcoming release 6 of our engine we have added a couple of nice features. E.g. we are introducing a flowchart module which will help you describe business processes and work flows.

But, one of the other things that will be visible immediately, are our new icons. Over time the icon set that we use has become, to put it mildly, a bit out of sink. Icons were designed by different visual designers, I 'borrowed' from Office; you know how it goes.

We decided to go through the entire interface and replace all icons with icons that can be found here:

http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/silk/

This is a free, yet professional set of icons that is used quite regularly. It holds about 80% of the icons that we need. The missing icons will be in the style of the famfam icons.

We also implemented the skinning engine by DevExpress. Although it doesn't make the software any better, it is always nice to have a good looking interface. And the end user can now select from 20 different themes to give the software a bit of a personal look.

Btw: the famfam icons are PNG images. I used the TcxImageList of DevExpress to use those. That gives a much better visual appearance than the good old icons that we all know.

Bye for now,

Bart