Solo Technology

In no particular order…

I had a look at Backpack yesterday. Another web-based organizer app and generally the one all the Web 2.0 and GTD cool kids suggest. I guess I can now infer Zoho Planner might have been influenced in their app’s design. Lol! Granted, the Zoho one gives a LOT more for free. Gotta pay the 37 signals folks a bit to get all the bells turned on.

Some quick observations:

• Backpack has a calendar (after you pay) and Zoho Planner has Appointments
• Zohoplanner will let you upload file attachments — gotta pay Backpack first.
• Backpack has Image uploads (after you pay). You can attach images with Zoho Planner via the file attachment thingy. Uploaded images show as, well, an image.

So, what keeps Zoho in business if they give all this away for free? Not that I’m complaining, but if I’m gonna use ‘em, I hope they’re around for a while. At some level, I’d rather see some ads or a small subscription notice. [I recently had a look at Zoho Planner]

Next topic: For the developer types using MS stuff: Free MSDN Library! 3 ISOs of microsoft development goodness. I’d see this as a positive trend.

Speaking of development stuff, Coding Horror blog has an interesting article up about Source Control in which he seriously pans Visual Source Safe (VSS). Ok, not that he’s blazing a new trail there. It’s a good read and I learned some things.

(psst, check out that VSS link. Doesn’t that lady look like she has little white devil horns? hehe)

I’m sure the reason so many shops use VSS, warts and all, is because the MS Development tools work with it so nicely (some even bundle it along). It’s hard to want to go look for a replacement when your source control was essentially “free” and is deeply integrated in your toolset.

In a case of interesting timing, we’ve been kicking around how we use VSS at work this week and I’ve been wondering if there might not be a better direction to go (for cheap). I don’t know if we (the work “we”, that is) are all on the same page with terminology, but it seems the request is really towards the branch/merge type stuff. We’ve got a lot more developers than we used to and not every project is a one man show anymore (thank gawd!). Finding something else cheap seems to be the challenge. Oh, and of course we want the replacement to be just as integrated with Visual Studio. /sigh/

Final development note: I’m in the Devshop private beta. I really need to spend more time with it poking and prodding, but after spending just an hour or so with it I was pretty blown away. I hope I can find more time to play with it soon. And we (that work “we” again) are very curious about pricing once it leaves beta (I invited our PM to poke at it too).  May be a future post on this topic.

2 Responses to “Tuesday Stuff - Productivity and Development”

1. Jeff Atwood on August 16th, 2006 1:02 am
   

   > (psst, check out that VSS link. Doesn’t that lady look like she has little white devil horns? hehe)

   OMG, I totally thought the same thing! She, like VSS, is clearly an agent of Satan.

2. Arvind on August 17th, 2006 6:18 am
   

   Thanks for trying out Zoho Planner & the other Zoho apps as well! We currently have paid versions for Zoho CRM, Zoho Virtual Office & Zoho Challenge. Other services will continue to have free personal accounts & in future, we plan to have paid versions of these services as well.

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