Developing Software

If you want to develop a kick ass software that is salable create an awesome almost impossible project. Let me explain.

You see many of the software we use today was created to solve a problem. It wasn't created because someone taught this would be nice and cool to have. Look at Weta Digital an Oscar winning visual effect company responsible for Lord of the Rings trilogy and Avatar. They created MASSIVE and CityBot because the work they needed in their movies. Another example is 37signals Basecamp which gave birth to Ruby on Rails. There's so many others as well.

I'm a firm believer in solving your problem first and maybe someone else may benefit it from it or not. But if they don't at least you solved your problem.

Optical character recognition (OCR)

Optical character recognition

I had a scanned document on my computer as an image and I didn't want to type the whole thing out nor did I have expensive software to covert the text on the image to "encoded text". I found a free software called onlineocr. It does exactly that, I wished I had something like this back in college.

Debugging for Internet Explorer

I posted earlier that I will stop going out of my way to make a site compatible with Internet Explore. However that is not a choice for everyone and if you have a client who is out of touch they might want comparability with IE so here is a link to My Debugbar IE tester. Its a free software that allow you to test your website on all IE version without having to download IE.


Seen at Slice and Dice that PSD second video towards the end.

37 signals Blog

I spend hours reading their blog and enjoying their unordinary views of how to run a business.

Check them out

http://37signals.com/svn

Video Card Test

I been watching this guy on youtube called Linus Sebastian at NCIX.com where he talks about computer hardware. He is able to use many different programs to test/benchmark his new hardware which makes guessing not an option (this is a good this). One good software he uses is called Fraps. Fraps does a couple of things like read how many frame rate per sercond (FPS) your game or video is playing, and record your screen. I haven't tried recording my screen but I wonder how it compares to Camtasia. Anyways what I used it for was to test how many FPS my computer runs a game or youtube video and it sucks. I need a new video card or a computer entirely. But its a useful software that happened to fall on my lap.