Category: Web/Tech

FeedDemon Wins SIA Award

Published on by Nick Bradbury7 Comments

Last night I returned from this year’s Shareware Industry Conference, and I’m pleased to report that FeedDemon won an SIA award for “Best Internet Enhancement or Utility.” I’m not much of a public speaker so my acceptance speech was shockingly brief, but I do want everyone who attended to know how thankful I am that I won.

Unfortunately, my laptop’s modem died while I was away, so I’ve got quite a bit of catching up to do. If you’re waiting for a reply to an email or forum question, you should hear from me during the next 24 hours or so.

Shareware Business Blunders

Published on by Nick Bradbury8 Comments

NetCaptor‘s Adam Stiles just announced his new eBook, Shareware Business Blunders…and How to Avoid Them. Adam contacted 38 shareware authors – including myself – and asked them to talk about their mistakes, then compiled their answers into a 124-page PDF eBook.

If you’re a shareware author or you’re interested in becoming one, this book is certainly worth the $47 Adam is asking for it.

Speaking at Gnomedex

Published on by Nick Bradbury1 Comment

When I attended Gnomedex last year, I have to confess that I went with muted expectations. As it turned out, though, I had a great time, and rank it among the best conferences I’ve visited.

This year, not only am I attending the conference but I’m scheduled to speak on one of the panels. Along with blogging gurus Robert Scoble, Henry Copeland and Ross Rader, I’ll be discussing how to maximize your blogging strategies. I’m glad I have a couple of months to figure out what to say, because I’m not an experienced public speaker :)

Among the other confirmed speakers are Steve Wozniak, Wil Wheaton and Dan Gillmor.

The conference isn’t until September 30 so I’ll talk more about it closer to the time, but if you want to attend I recommend registering now. Unlike last year’s Iowa-based Gnomedex, this year it’s being held in Lake Tahoe – so I expect even more people to be there.

Microsoft begins to care about the browser wars, again

Published on by Nick Bradbury2 Comments

As reported by Ars Technica, News.com and numerous other sources, Microsoft has appointed Dave Massey as a technical evangelist for Internet Explorer.

Windows XP Sp2 features improvements to IE (such as popup blocking), but this news suggests that more improvements are in the works. My hope (and the hope of countless other web developers) is that these improvements will include more standards-compliant CSS2 support, correct MIME handling and the ability to display alpha PNGs. Oh, and tabbed browsing would also be nice. Hmmm…sounds like I just described Firefox and Opera :)

How Microsoft Lost the API War

Published on by Nick Bradbury11 Comments

Joel Spolsky’s recent essay on Microsoft’s API shift is a slam dunk. It’s a long article (as blog posts go), but it’s a must-read for developers.

Funny enough, I seriously considered moving my development to .NET by writing FeedDemon 1.0 in C#. The C# language itself is very nice, and .NET certainly makes some things a lot easier than Win32. But several existing RSS readers received poor reviews due to their .NET-related memory usage, and requiring the 20MB+ .NET runtime is suicide for most downloadable shareware apps. So, in the end I stuck with Delphi, which I’d used to create both TopStyle and HomeSite. Delphi creates standalone (ie: no runtime) Win32 executables, which for the moment makes it a better choice for shareware.

Oh, and I couldn’t help but nod in agreement with this quote from Paul Graham:

“If you want to write desktop software now you do it on Microsoft’s terms…and if you manage to write something that takes off, you may find that you were merely doing market research for Microsoft.”

I’m a one-person shareware company, and I even have to worry about the looming threat of Microsoft entering the same market that my software targets.