I heard this quote last week while listening to the commentary track on the latest Star Trek movie. It was a great reminder for me that the process of iterative design, and not planning out everything ahead of time, transcends software development. It also reiterated it’s effectiveness to me for creating inspired products that consumers really want. When your design decisions and inspiration are based on real world feedback rather than judgements made in a vacuum, I don’t think you can help but have a better outcome.

Photo courtesy Esquire.

Screen shot of Reveille

A few weeks back we introduced Reveille as a slick new way to tie your Backpack Calendar to Backpack Reminders.  Today we’re proud to say that Reveille is now available for anyone to check out.

Only 85 Days…Part time mind you

We built this fairly simplistic, but extremely useful application in 85 days while maintaining our current full time jobs, keeping our wives happy, spending time with our kids and helping with homework, serving at church, etc.  So, basically while we were living our normalish lives, we whipped this product out in our spare time.

How we 4HWW’d and Got Real with Reveille

As a “side” project, we had to make the most of our time and efforts.  We’re avid followers of 37signals and Tim Ferris so we applied many liberal doses of Getting Real and 4HWW to Reveille.  The end result of all the minimalist effort is that Reveille does basically one thing, it could do more, we’d like it to do much, much more, but for the time being it simply does this one thing:  Reveille automatically creates reminders for you based on your calendar items.

We’re bootstrapping the project so we are very picky about what we actually spend money on. We actually developed Reveille on a PC turned server in DL’s basement. We purchased a slice from Slicehost to run our production site on.  We used Basecamp to help us manage the project so we could easily see what was left to do and make judgment calls as to the importance of those tasks.  We took advice from Guy Kawasaki and Dharmesh Shah and we tried to release early and send out a “crappy version 1.0″.  Hopefully we succeeded because it was really hard to release it before we felt ready.  To provide great service from the start, we’re using Get Satisfaction for our help and support platform.

What took us so long?

Quite honestly, we probably sat on a “good enough” version of Reveille for a couple of weeks, but we were finding little bugs, and sometimes big bugs, that just “had” to be fixed.  Don’t worry though…Reveille still “shipped” with a few imperfections.  So give Reveille a try and see if you can find them.  When you do, shoot over to our Get Satisfaction site and tell us all about it.  If you like Reveille and find it useful, use the same Get Satisfaction site to tell us that too.  Oh..one more thing, do us a favor and tell all your friends about Reveille.

    begin
      @calendarapi.calendars
    rescue Exception => ex
      logger.info ex
      switch_ssl()
      retry
    end

Obviously this bit of code could end in a continuous loop so be careful to add a little logic to ensure a clean exit.

We are very excited to introduce, and give you a little preview of the first application from Wikid Labs. It’s called Reveille, and it is going to add some great new features to 37signals’ Backpack application that aren’t available today.

Before we tell you more about the features, we want to explain a little of the history behind the idea for Reveille.  We have been happy users of 37signal’s Basecamp and Backpack for about two years. In fact, we’ve used Basecamp to manage the development of Reveille.  The idea for Reveille came as Greg’s wife was trying to move the family calendar completely into Backpack from iCal on her Mac, but was finding the management of reminders to be a bit of a challenge.  She wanted an easier way to add the reminders she was used to having, for instance, reminders for friends birthdays, or other important appointments. The solution hit Greg one day, late October, in the place where all good ideas seem to come, the shower.

What we’ve ended up developing is a system for being able to automatically create reminders for Backpack calendar events by using special hashtags in the event names.  For example, you might want to create an event for an important meeting and be reminded of it two hours prior. Today, you have two choices in Backpack for doing this.  You could use the built-in event reminders set for 30 minutes before the event, which may not remind you when you want. Or, you could manually add a reminder for the event, which is way too much work in our opinion.  The new option, using Reveille, is to create your event and somewhere in the event name you would include ‘#rem2hrs’. When Reveille scans your calendar it will pick up the hashtag and add a reminder two hours before the event for you.  And, even better, it means there’s no limit to the number of reminders per event. You can add as many reminder hashtags as you care to.  We found this to be a great shortcut for managing calendar reminders, and we hope you will too.

Just to summarize, Reveille’s main features are:

1. Automatic reminder creation for calendar events from within Backpack or any other Backpack app that allows the creation of calendar events.
2. Easily create multiple reminders for a calendar event just by using more hashtags
3. See and manage your reminders, shown in relationship to your calender events, from a simple interface within Reveille.

Reveille isn’t publicly available just yet, so check out our website to signup for our email newsletter, and follow us on Twitter so that we can keep you up to date on the release of Reveille, and exclusive discount offers.  We hope you’re as excited as we are about using Reveille to streamline your calendar experience in Backpack.  We totally welcome your feedback, so please let us know what you think.

That may sound like a silly question at first glance since we usually associate character with people. The idea of company character makes a ton of sense once you realize that a company is it’s own entity. Any company that employs at least one person has a character and since every company employs at least its owner then I think it could safely be said that all companies have character, be it good or bad.

Before you can answer the question “What is the character of my company?” it’s probably important to identify what defines the character of a company.

Company character IS NOT defined by a mission statement, what’s on the About Us page or by what the founder/owner says it is. Company character IS defined by the content that you put out, i.e. blog posts, Twitter and Facebook updates and public forum answers. It is also, and most importantly, defined by how you treat your customers.

In order to gain a better idea of how you treat your customers answer these questions. Be honest with yourself.

How do you treat potential customers?
How do you treat your newest customer?
How do you treat your oldest customer?
How do you treat unhappy customers?
How do you treat satisfied customers?
How do you treat customers who are canceling their service?

Now… notice that I used the word “treat.” I didn’t ask “What do you do for” or “What do you think of”, I asked “How do you treat”. The word “treat” infers to me the attitude take towards, the level of respect given to or the amount of schmoozing laid upon any given customer, be it an individual or an organization. Think about how you use the word treat when describing how someone treated you. That’s how I want you to define it in this context.

Sadly the answers to these questions will probably all be different for most companies. Ideally the answers should all be pretty much the same. Your company, i.e. you and ALL of your companies representatives, should treat your potential, newest, oldest, happiest, unhappiest and previous customers with the same level of respect and charisma. It’s quite likely that if that were to occur or is occurring in your company right now the company is going to prosper because all of it’s customers will be happy and loyal customers, and those customers are the lifeblood of any company.

Probably the strongest indicator of company character will show up during the process of canceling a sale. No one wants a customer to cancel service, return an item, etc. but it’s going to happen. How will it be dealt with? Will your company representative be hostile or accommodating? Will the ex-customer walk away from the deal glad to get away from your poisonous life sucking excuse for a company? Or will the ex-customer be saddened that s/he won’t be doing business with such a happy, enjoyable, positive and uplifting group of individuals.

Zappos.com has set the bar ridiculously high for this type of customer service. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has driven this type of company character from the top down. I’ve heard him say in interviews that Zappos isn’t so much a shoe company, but a customer service company. I’m actually kind of sad that I’ve never ordered a pair of shoes from Zappos simply because I love the character that the company exudes. I want to do business with them.

Do people want to do business with your company or are they glad to get away?

First, how did we find ourselves in this situation? Well, it certainly wasn’t hard. Our idea for Haven (a web-based collaborative development environment you’ll be hearing more about very soon) started small, and over time we designed more and more features that we thought we would solve some of the problems we have with traditional IDEs. It was a natural process, and we are building this application for ourselves so it was really fun to dream. We were excited and got started with development. Little did we know we were creating a huge problem for ourselves by jumping in so quickly. We very quickly got overwhelmed by all that needed to be done.

The kick in the pants we needed was to go back and heed some advice from 37signals’ book, Getting Real. In it, the authors had the answer to our problem:

We’ve read Getting Real and have followed 37signals’ Blog, Signal vs. Noise, for quite some time. If you aren’t following them already I highly recommend you grab their RSS feed. We are familiar with the ideas they used to build their successful business. The idea of doing less was not really that new to us. But, we still resisted the process because we were unwilling to put aside more advanced features that we thought would make us really love using Haven. Still, during a recent planning conversation, at last we really “got real”. We agreed to focus on a short list of three key features. And it’s the best decision we’ve made to date.

We realized that “doing less” means the features we thought were important needed to be put aside (perhaps for a few months, perhaps forever) until we had our key features nailed. It’s a scary proposition to turn your back on what you feel are your unique, customer attracting features. But, the wisdom in doing this is you are going to have the experience and feedback of using the application to draw from as you begin to slowly add additional features.

So, my advice is to sit down early and really focus on what the core functionality is for your application. Then once you’ve done than, it might help even more to do it again for good measure. It will save you time immediately and going forward because you will be adding features out of experience instead of pulling them out of thin air.

I hope you found this information helpful in some way. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Here are a few high level requirements for Wikid Editor.

1. It had to run inside the browser and it needed to work in all browsers or at least the main ones, Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome.
2. It needed to be able to color text any way we wanted.
3. It should be able to color the background of rows.
4. It needed to be able to communicate with our servers without reloading the page and preferably be able to receive pushed data from our servers.
5. It needed to perform well.

We pretty much had it narrowed down to JavaScript, Flex or Silverlight. There may well have been other choices but we either didn’t find them or they didn’t seem practical or feasible to us. Any one of the three would technically work so for us it came down to these areas of concert.

1. Cross browser compatibility (Winners: Flex, Silverlight)
   1. JavaScript – While there are several frameworks that have done a great job of dealing with this issue it’s still something that has to be dealt with or be concerned about, especially when new or updated browsers are released.
   2. Flex – The crew at Adobe are not flawless but they are tasked with keeping up with browser compatibility not us and not an open source community.
   3. Silverlight – Kinda in the same boat as Flex, Microsoft is tasked with keeping up with the Jones’ so we don’t have to.
2. Maturity of the framework (Winners: JavaScript, Flex)
   1. JavaScript – No questions there, as far as I know it’s the oldest of the bunch
   2. Flex – While the Flex framework is only a few years old the Flash player has been around for quite a while.
   3. Silverlight – Silverlight is pretty new. Microsoft has put a ton of work into it so I’m sure that it would work out but it’s the baby of the bunch.
3. How does our skill set match up (Winners: Flex, JavaScript)
   1. JavaScript – Neither of us were JavaScript ninjas but it wouldn’t be to hard to get up to speed fast.
   2. Flex – We had just finished up a project in Flex so it was fresh on our minds.
   3. Silverlight – Other than having some C# and ASP.Net under my our belt this Silverlight is not something that we know real well.
4. In browser performance
   1. We didn’t do any testing just some studying up on architecture

So we chose to write the editor in Flex. It was pretty fun and we learned a ton. It took me about 6 weeks of spare time coding to get the highlighting to work but it was slow. Over the course of 6 months I finally learned enough about lexers, regexp and real-time highlighting design that I got a working version that was pretty speedy.

Was Flex the right choice? I can say that it wasn’t the wrong choice. I can also say that there are a few JavaScript text editors that boast highlighting capabilities. I’d say that there may not be a right or wrong choice but that you shoud stick with what you know best. If it works, great, if not, sweet, you get to learn something new.

Stay tuned for a more techinical dive next time.

I hate telling folks that there software must suck but I’d guess, based on the blatant overuse of techno music, fast movements and quick dramatic sales speech, that the http://www.imindmap.com/ software needs a lot of selling to get anyone to try it. If you need all that hype you probably spent too much money on the development of the software and it probably sucks from over-engineering.

Remember simple, fast, easy, no frills software is the stuff that gets people excited. Needless to say I’m not even going to try iMindMap, it reminds me too much of an Office application. It does so much that you can’t do anything useful with it.