Posted on

It’s the 13th, but not Friday and Version Two-dot-oh has been released

A short and sweet post to let everyone know that Surfulater Version 2.00 has been released and is available for download.

With some releases everything just falls nicely into place and away you go. This one was just a bit on the troublesome side. Some problems were of my own making and others were in the latest release of a 3rd party code library that Surfulater uses. Together they conspired against me and delayed the release by at least a week.

But the good news is a new release is out and better still we’ve progressed to Version 2 which I’m very pleased about and is a great way to end the year. This is the eleventh release for 2006, each one building on the last and moving Surfulater further along the path to world net to knowledge domination. Whoops, sorry. I meant it is continuing its journey to meet your needs and wishes, to make it the absolute best program of its type out there.

On a more serious note I plan to write about the new features and enhancements in Version 2 shortly. In the meantime you can jump on over and read the release notes.

Now I just have to hope that the 13th (not Friday) is reasonably uneventful. I nearly waited another day to put the release out, true dinks.

Posted on

Its not unusual to… (feel free to sing along)

It’s not unusual for folks to tell us how much they love using Surfulater, but we don’t get much feedback about the Surfulater web site. So I was very pleasantly surprised when I received the following e-mail from Deborah Merritt who has recently discovered and purchased Surfulater.

Neville,

I’ve been playing with this for just a short time, but I love the program.  I have no experience at all with programs like this.  But for a long time I have wanted some sort of program to organize my research.  I’m a professor and started out in the days when we used notecards!  Just out of curiosity, I put “research software” into google and started looking at a few of the programs that turned up.  I hadn’t even thought about a program that primarily organized material from the web.  But as I thought about it, I realized that most of my research now–even from scholarly journals–is online.  So I kept browsing.  I liked your site because (1) it referred to full text searching, and (2) there were “fun” features and it didn’t seem to take itself too seriously.  I decided to give the free download a try.

After just an hour or so, I was hooked.  I happily purchased the software and have been continuing to enjoy it.  Thanks so much for developing this.  I’m starting slow, with the basic features, but I’m sure that soon I’ll be checking the blog and forums for more advanced ideas.  Cheers!  Debby

Deborah J Merritt
John Deaver Drinko/Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law
Moritz College of Law
The Ohio State University 

When we designed the Surfulater web site I wanted to make sure it looked good and got our message across as quickly and simply as possible. Often you visit a Web site and leave without having any idea what the site was about. I’ve read statistics that indicate you have about 5 seconds to grab someone’s attention, before they’ll give up and move on. When your business relies on sales from your Web site, you really do want folks to stay somewhat longer than those 5 small seconds. I’ve written here before about having to pander to search engines, instead of writing for your readers, which is really infuriating. Getting the balance right is the hard part, a bit like writing software.

So it was great to get Deborah’s e-mail and as I told her at the time it made my day, which hadn’t been a particularly good one! We’ve had a few more exchanges since and I’m pleased to say Deborah is one very, very happy Surfulater user. This is an excerpt from an e-mail I received from Debby yesterday

I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record, but this really was a tremendous help in gathering info.  I read lots of medical journals online, in addition to more popular websites, and it used to drive me crazy keeping all of this stuff straight.  So thanks again for everything!  Debby

In closing I want to let you know how we can help folks by providing Surfulater discounts. If you run a Forum, a Blog, a Web site, a User Group, a Newsletter etc. we can provide your readers or members with a discount. Of course this helps us by getting more people to find out about Surfulater and it helps you with special offers you can provide to your readers. It was opportune to mention this here as Debby moderates a forum and I’ve provided her members with a discount. So let’s help each other. Just drop me an email and we’ll get started – see the Surfulater Contact page for my e-mail address.

Until next time, have a great week,
Neville

PS. Another great new Surfulater release out soon.

Posted on

Goal-Free Living With Stephen Shapiro

I did my usual weekend house chores which gives me the opportunity to listen to Podcasts, which is something I relish. I want to recommend a great interview that Michael D. Pollock of Solostream Webstudio did with Stephen Shapiro about his book and web site Goal-Free Living.

Stephen talks about how many successful people he’s interviewed don’t equate their success to lots of goal setting and how people become stressed by goal setting. Likewise todo lists can become a real burden and get in the way of what needs to be done. Stephen keeps a short todo list with just the top priority items on it. Then he has a can do list for everything else. Items move across from the can do list to the todo list as necessary. I do like the sound of this.

Other concepts Michael and Stephen discuss include “Use a Compass, Not a Map” where you find the intersecting point between passion (what you love to do), skills (what you are good at), and value (what creates value – for you and others). If you can achieve the right amount of passion, skills and value you can be successful in whatever it is you want to achieve.

I’ve always been passionate about what I do and what I deliver to my customers. And I’ve always felt I deliver real value. Skills is where I come up short. Not in in the ability to create good products, but in my abilities to be a great marketer and salesperson. People that run small business’s need to be skilled in many different areas, which is simply a fact of life, so we do the best we can and get on with it.

I’m sure you will find SavvySoloCAST #29: Goal-Free Living With Stephen Shapiro a great way to start your week.

Posted on

Two in one – Surfulater V1.99, Build 2.0 Released

Two releases in the one week, we must be getting close to Christmas. This release will make our bleeding edge users happy, as Surfulater now works with IE7 RC1 and also with Firefox Version 2.0, RC2.  Note that neither IE7, nor FF2 have actually been released yet.

There was a problem with Attachments not opening if IE7 was installed, along with a more pressing problem which came out in this weeks V1.99.1.0 release. The latter prevented expandable fields from appearing at their full height and was caused by all of the CSS changes which have recently been made. Both of these have been fixed and Surfulater now behaves itself, if either IE6 or IE7 is installed. Hopefully no further problems will show up when IE7 is finally released.

For Firefox Version 2, RC2 I’m pleased to say all that was required was a simple update to the Surfulater Firefox Extension. In earlier days the Firefox folks make a number of changes which broke lots of Extensions. I was dreading that being the case again, which it wasn’t. If you are using FF V2 you need to download and install the new extension.

I’d not seen either IE7 or Firefox V2 until yesterday and without wanting to stir up any debates I have to say I really do like what I’ve seen so far in IE7. It looks good, seems smooth and fast and works well. Unfortunately I can’t quiet say the same for Firefox V2. However neither product has been released yet, so it is premature to make any final judgments.

Downloads are in the usual place, so go for it. Oh and release notes are over here.

Posted on

Surfulater V1.99, Build 1.0 out now

Just a quick note to let everyone know that the latest release of Surfulater is now available for download. I would have posted earlier but there have been a few hiccups and we’ve got workmen here making lots of noise, which is a tad distracting.

If you have Internet Explorer Version 7 (Beta? or RC1) installed I suggest you stick with V1.98.4.0 for now as Texas Tomato has reported a problem which is caused by IE7. I’ll be looking at the IE7 issues shortly and hope they’ll be easy enough to resolve.

Two other problems showed up today. One by Perry Mowbray that turns out isn’t new, and another by David Wengier that sort of is. The good news is I’ve already fixed them both, and neither should prevent you from using this new release.

You’ll find the nitty-gritty details about this release in the Surfulater Help and also on our Forums. Make sure you backup your Knowledge Bases before installing any new release, as well as on a regular basis.

I’ll write in more detail about the latest release once the hammering stops, if not   sooner. In the mean time have a great week.

PS. Please excuse the MojoPac distractions.

PPS. Perry reckons the new release is snazzy.

Posted on

MojoPac – Potentially Great Software with Serious Flaws

The ability to run Surfulater from a USB Stick is something our users and I would like to see. It is easy to carry around your Knowledge Base files on a USB stick or even use them directly from a USB stick, but there are times when you are using someone else’s PC and want to use Surfulater. One way to accomplish this is to run it on the USB stick. However there are hurdles to overcome, primarily in respect to licensing and conversely piracy. We need to ensure that our customers can use their copy of Surfulater on a USB stick, but prevent unlicensed use, and that’s the difficult part.

To my knowledge only U3 USB sticks provide the capabilities software developers need to adequately protect their software on USB sticks, however there is a reasonable amount of effort required to get your software working on U3 devices and I’ve read where some folks aren’t all that happy with the way U3 works and about it not working in some corporate environments. So I’ve shied away from this as a solution and have been looking at alternative ways of meeting the need to access Surfulater Knowledge Bases on different PC’s. For example providing the ability to view KB’s in a Web Browser, without needing Surfulater installed at all. I’m also working on synchronization, which will make it a breeze to use the same KB’s at work and at home.

So what’s this about MojoPac? My friend Leigh Wardle e-mailed me yesterday to tell me he had Surfulater running on a USB stick using a new product called MojoPac and my reaction was wow, followed by how! I couldn’t see how they could protect licensed software from being pirated by copying the MojoPac installation. I told Leigh of my concerns and he promptly e-mailed me back an excerpt from their Web site that indicated the software was protected by locking it to the serial number of the USB device, and therefore copying it to another USB stick wouldn’t work. I thought ok that sounds great I really need to give this thing a try. Unfortunately it was downhill from there.

I duly registered on the MojoPac web site and downloaded the software. My first problem was that I wasn’t able to install it on my 1G Corsair Flash Voyager USB stick because it doesn’t have a serial number. That’s fine and good, as without a serial number they can’t provide the protection software developers need.

I tried another USB device and it worked a treat. Start it up and you get a clean, brand spanking new instance of Windows XP running. I have to tell you I was impressed, and still am.

Next I installed Surfulater and after a small hiccup it installed and ran perfectly. I exited MojoPac, moved the USB device to another PC and started it there and again it worked a treat. Next I activated the Surfulater license to get it from a Trial Version to a Full Version and did some more testing, which all went fine.

Then I moved the USB drive back to the original PC, started MojoPac and Surfulater and Surfulater ran as a Free Trial when it should have been fully licensed! This is problem number one. In essence any software that uses protection techniques that check for various installed hardware will likely not work with MojoPac, as it stands. This is because a MojoPac system includes a mix of the underlying PC’s hardware plus its own emulated or virtual hardware. To resolve this the underlying hardware should not be visible in MojoPac. I think you’ll find a fair bit of commercial software won’t work, because of this. But things get worse.

I kept thinking that relying on a serial number alone to protect MojoPac and all the licensed software installed therein couldn’t be adequate and it didn’t take long to prove that I was right.

I went back to my original Corsair USB stick (without a serial number) and installed a virtual drive. This looks to Windows like a real drive and includes a serial number. MojoPac installed and ran fine on this, and my initial reaction was great. But then reality set in. I can copy this virtual drive to another USB stick or hard drive, or post it on the Internet for others to use, and MojoPac works.

This means that MojoPac itself is easy to copy (pirate) and use without paying for it, but the far bigger problem for me as a commercial software developer, is that it makes my software just as easy to copy and use for free. Surfulater won’t run on a different hardware configuration as I mentioned above, which is a MojoPac failing they need to resolve, but other licensed software I tried works perfectly.

I really don’t want to rain on their parade as I see MojoPac has great potential if these issues can be resolved, but my feeling is that the underlying issues will be difficult to fix. The MojoPac Web site tells us they’ve got some very clever people working there and they are nicely cashed up with VC Funds, so resources shouldn’t be a problem (yeah I’m jealous I know). As things stand right now they need to take some urgent action before they get into serious hot water. If it were my product I’d remove it from the market untiil I could address these issues.

There also seems to be discontentment brewing over on the MojoPac Support Forums, with company representatives AWOL. Hopefully they’ll return soon.

Posted on

Getting close now

The next Surfulater release is coming along very nicely. The main new feature is the ability to control and create your own style sheets. These are used to control the look of information in the content window. Color Themes (previously color styles) have been removed from the Knowledge Base file and are now in a stand alone XML file, making it easier to add new themes and share them around. These changes lay the groundwork for enhancements to the way article templates work and to make it easier to create new ones or modify existing ones. You can refer back to the article Content styling and templates for more on this.

Other changes are enhancements to the Surfulater SXCF format (see Pushing content into Surfulater from other Programs – Part 1 and Pushing content into Surfulater from other Programs – Part 2) to enable the Folder for the content to be specified, as well as allowing new folders to be created. Also issues with using Surfulater under a Non-Administrator account have been addressed. And the bug mentioned the last blog post has of course been fixed along with a variety of other odds and sods.

It will be nice to let this release see the light of day. A bit more code to write yet and lots of testing to be done to ensure all the changes don’t cause any problems.

I’ll have extremely limited Internet access until later on the 25th of Sep, so you won’t see any comments from me, to your comments, for a few days.

Posted on

There is a bug

I found out last week that there is a bug which I introduced in the last release V1.98.4.0 which prevents Surfulater from creating new articles if it isn’t already running. You get an error message saying you need to open a knowledge base, even if there is one open.

I was hoping to get a new release out this week to fix this, however I’m in the midst of various changes which I don’t want to rush and create more problems, when there is a simple work-around. Just ensure Surfulater is running before you capture any content from your Web Browser and you won’t have any problems.

Posted on

Jumping hurdles

When I was a young fellow at secondary school we had to jump hurdles in the physical education class. I have to tell you I was petrified every time we had to do this. I was short and the hurdles were these obstacles I had real difficulty getting over. Most of the time we both ended up horizontal on the ground.

These days there are still plenty of hurdles around. Sometimes programming seems to be all about getting over one hurdle only to reach the next one all too quickly. And sometimes the hurdles seem to be more like brick walls! In the end though we always get to where we want to go, even if by a circuitous route.

A far bigger hurdle for me these days is getting more people to know about Surfulater and to understand and appreciate how useful a tool it can be for them. You have no idea how frustrating this is. If Surfulater was just another piece of poorly designed, poorly implemented software that didn’t meet any reel need, then there would be good reasons why folks weren’t interested in it. But that isn’t the case at all. Our users think Surfulater is a truly wonderful product, and of course they are right. Now this is great news and, as I wrote to a new user Sidney Whitehead yesterday, it is a great motivator which helps keep Surfulater on a steady growth path.

This is an excerpt from yesterday’s e-mail from Sidney:

Congratulations on creating such a well thought out and useful product.  I was so thrilled to find precisely what I needed in Surfulater that three days was enough to convince me to purchase the product.  Anyone accustomed to filing clippings from magazines and newspapers should now be relieved that they can do the same thing with added functionality in an electronic format.  I just happened to stumble across your product after doing a Google search on “saving web pages”, in which Surfulater appeared as the tenth entry at the bottom of the page.  I’m convinced that if more people were aware that such a fantastic piece of software existed, they would convert immediately.

I’m convinced that Sydney is absolutely correct in his assessment. And therein lies the problem – getting more people to be Surfulater aware.

In my mission for Surfulater success I’ve been trying to find solutions to my marketing problems. I’ve talked to and communicated with various marketing people and companies, but so far haven’t found anyone that could make a real difference, well at least not in a cost effective way. One person that has been helpful is John Seiffer who is a small business coach. Our discussions inspired John to write Marketing, Sales & Dating on his blog. I’ve replied with a comment which elaborates on the issues I’m facing. I was going to re-post that here but decided it would be best read in context with John’s article.

Marketing is hard, no doubt about it. It is something you need to devote a lot of time and energy to, to get anywhere. Occasionally luck is on your side, or you happen to know someone that knows someone that …, well you get the idea. And things get in your way, like the need to continually improve the product, fix problems, provide support, talk to your spouse, eat and sleep. And if you think marketing is hard then try programming.

Ok, let me wrap this up. Go and read John’s blog post and my reply. If you know someone that knows someone, please put me in touch. If you have any ideas that can help with spreading the word about Surfulater, please do let me know. And finally if you know someone who is good at marketing or at least is up to a challenge let’s talk.

Posted on

Not Happy!

For the past week and a bit I’ve been doing a lot of research into synchronization techniques, client/server technology, tcp/ip, Windows and Unix sockets and the like. This is all related to the work I’m doing to enable Surfulater databases to be synchronized, either locally across a LAN or across the globe via the Internet.

Synchronization enables you to use the same Knowledge Bases on say your Work and Home PC and have them automatically kept in sync, so you don’t have to manually copy them back and forth. I use Surfulater on a Desktop and Notebook PC and regularly switch between the two, but first I have to copy all of my Knowledge Base files across, some of which are quite large. Then when I’m finished I have to ensure I copy them back. KB synchronization will do all of this for me, without me lifting a finger. The good news is I’ve got a proof of concept implementation working.

So you must be wondering what’s with the Not Happy! Well during my research I came across a particularly interesting article which I only had time to glance at, and put it aside to read in full later on. Well later on arrived last night and for the life of me I can’t find the slightest hint that the aforesaid article ever existed. I’ve searched my Surfulater Knowledge Bases, looked at the last few weeks articles in the Chronological History, searched my Web Browser Favorites and History on my Desktop and Notebook PC’s and I’ve come up completely empty. In complete exasperation I used Google to search for the terms that I thought should locate the Web page for me, worked through pages and pages of results, tried other search terms and after 2 hours gave up.

There is a lesson to be learnt here, and I for one should know it better than anyone. That’s why I’m not happy!