Small bit of news.
Ludo, one of the Factory Nova users, volunteered to create and moderate an unofficial support group for Factory Nova on Google Groups. If you have any questions or anything else you’d like to share with other Factory Nova users please use the links below to join the group.
Join the group to be able to post messages:
http://groups.google.com/group/factory-nova/subscribe?note=1
Read the group:
http://groups.google.com/group/factory-nova/topics
We’ve officially announced that our products business is on hold.
This blog will be on hold as well for the time being and meanwhile you might be interested in my personal blog which I’ve just started.
I think that’s obvious. Google misses file sharing functionality of Dropbox and Dropbox misses editing functionality of Google Docs. Dropbox is VC funded. I bet at least one of the exit strategies (if not the main one) is selling the company to Google and integrating the service into Google Docs.
We in Stuffed Guys are lucky to be working with an outstanding designer nickoose. He is the person who have originally come up with an idea to physically create a real stuffed doll for our new site that he was designing in 2005. That doll is mr. Stuffed, you can see him in our official logo and in the header of this blog (by the way, the image in the header of this blog is not computer-generated if you were wondering, it’s a photo of a real custom-made doll in custom-made clothes).
Well, nickoose strikes again! This time with the main art concept for the new Stuffed Tracker site which we’ve launched several weeks ago. Here it is:
The main ideas:
The tree can as well be your advertising campaign which you analyze with Stuffed Tracker :)
I think the concept and the art are just amazing.
The new version of WordPress as you might already know features a fancy new file uploader. It actually uses a hidden Flash movie to allow you to choose multiple files at once for uploading and displays a progress of uploading.
The thing is — it doesn’t really work.
There are numerous reports of people for whom the new uploader just hangs forever in a so called “Crunching” final state. I’ve tried it on two different computers with two different browsers and it didn’t work for me ANYWHERE. The files were actually uploaded on the server, but the uploader didn’t seem to understand that this actually happened.
I am mentioning this mostly because we’ve actually tried to use a Flash-based file uploader in Factory Nova more then a year ago. It is very tempting to finally be able to show the progress of a file upload in the browser without any server-based tricks (which get much more trickier if you are using PHP on the server).
But we’ve eventually got rid of it as not ready for real-life use. There were (and as WordPress experience shows — still are) two major problems with Flash-based uploading:
Unfortunately, as the latest version of WordPress shows, Flash-based uploading is still not ready for production server/software use. Which is a pitty, it could have been a great addition to the Web experience.
While examining the most frequently used keywords on Google which were used to arrive to this blog (as reported by our own Stuffed Tracker, of course), Ivan has discovered that lots of them are related to porn for some reason. That was strange, since this blog has nothing to do with porn in any way, so we started investigating.
It turned out that WordPress which powers this blog had an unfortunate security hole in one of the previous versions which allowed anyone to modify already existing posts via XML-RPC interface. Our version was newer that the one that was affected, but apparently someone managed to use this exploit on our blog while we still used the older unprotected version of the blog software. So we had links to porn sites in a hidden layer on the front page in the latest 5-6 posts, they were indexed by Google and we got first places on some specific porn-related searches.
The amusing thing is that the people who modified the posts kept the original posts untouched (thank you very much!) and just added their hidden HTML in the end (yeah, I know they did it to stay unnoticed, but still that was good of them). Getting rid of this stuff was trivial of course.
And Stuffed Tracker saved the day!
BTW, we’ve launched a completely new stand-alone site for the new 3rd generation of Stuffed Tracker not long ago.
Or it is definitely winning.
After my previous posts about the experience that I had with Vista I’ve encountered the most serious problem in it — the network part of Vista was “reworked”, which in Microsoft speak I guess means “fubar“. It just doesn’t work. You know, as in “just works”, but the other way around.
I won’t go into detail here, but I, a reasonably experienced Windows user, was not able to properly setup the damn network at all (the internet connection sharing and all this stuff). And this is not the worst part.
The worst part is that now — after I finally managed to make the network work in some form — I can’t connect to my server from my laptop using a VPN connection (again, not going into much details). This works in XP without problems and not in Vista.
It will be a big pity if Apple won’t get a huge crowd of converts now. I am certainly planning to convert. Just waiting for the Jaguar to be released hopefully along with the update to the Apple’s Macbook Pro line (which are gorgeous already, but are almost a year old).
And while I am waiting, I am back to XP.
PS. And I agree that this might just happen. Microsoft is very close (as probably it has never been before) to losing it’s top position.
Created this simple diagram to compare the usual direct project communication (when all people involved in the project talk to each directly) with the project communication based on Factory Nova.
Obviously, Factory Nova works as a centralized repository for everything project-related. All people involved in the project, instead of communicating directly with each other now communicate indirectly — that is through Factory Nova. This helps to keep all the information regarding the project in one place and easily accessible.
But there is one more thing.
Factory Nova notifies everyone involved in the project about everything that happens in the project. And it does it via email.
We decided to rely on the email, because we think that an email client is the best personal productivity software that exists today. Modern email clients are so sophisticated that you can do absolutely wonderful things with them — tagging emails as tasks (with stars or flags), create “smart” email folders which would contain only flagged emails-tasks which you have to do as soon as possible, filter and search all emails very quickly.
Factory Nova works as the central mechanism for managing all the information about the project and you can actually use it for everything, including working with your tasks if you are comfortable of using a web browser and a web interface for this. But, you can also just rely on the email notifications that are send to you to manage your own personal workflow.
This works not only for the developers/workers in the project, but for the managers too. For example, I am a manager in the project and I get an email notification from Factory Nova that a certain task was just finished by a developer. I quickly look through the final developer comments which are also available to me in the email notification and I see that something is not right. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to deal with this right now, so I just flag this email in my email client and it becomes my personal task. Later that day, I will look through all the flagged emails, solve each problem and unflag all corresponding emails.
So in our opinion email is far from dead and is ideally suited for a scenario that I’ve described. We will certainly add RSS in this scheme this year, although I am not sure if the RSS reader clients will fit this as good as the email clients. But we will see.
Apparently, lots of people have trouble with Vista doing something with their hard drive all the time. My previous post about this gets quite a lot of hits from Google.
Here are the top keywords for this week:
