Kablingy

Today we had to test our application (Overtake) on the recently released IE 8. I was quite hopeful as my Twitter friends had spoken favourably of it, and I figured after all this time, Microsoft would eventually produce something that was compliant and respectful of industry standards. Lofty goals of compliance aside, what I was wanted was that the application would behave as it already does in Firefox, Safari, Opera & Chrome. I develop for Firefox, and 9 out of 10 times, everything is perfect in all of the other browsers. This is all I wanted for IE 8. In short, I wanted to forget about IE from the development cycle.

Happiness did not follow.

Installation

The fun started with the installer. As usual IE 8 can’t separate itself from the operating system. An update to Internet Explorer is a multi stepped and time consuming process. It means an update of the OS, virus checks, integrity checks. Then there’s the questions. “What is your default search engine? Where would like to import Bookmarks? How are you coping in the recession?”.

Once this was over, I realised IE7 had been destroyed in the process. Since I really need IE7 for testing purposes, I went on a wild goose chase to have an operating system that runs IE 8, IE 7 and for fun, IE 6.

Bad idea.

Multiple IEs

To date, I’ve been using Tredosoft’s Multiple IE program which allows me to run IE 6 and IE 7 amounst others. It’s perfect for testing. So when I realised IE 7 was no more, I followed this advice and installed Tredosoft’s “Stand Alone” installation of IE 7 to complete my growing collection of pointless Microsoft browsers.

Don’t do this.

When I installed IE 7, it broke IE 8. Drop downs no longer worked! Everytime I clicked on a drop down box, the popup blocker(!!) was invoked and could not be disabled despite clicking every preference available. Of course I didn’t know the weirdism was because of the dual install. I guessed it was a defect in my coding. So this wasted another hour until I realised it wasn’t my fault.

The Reinstall

So now I went to re-install IE 8. This really took a long time. An hour easily. First it uninstalls everything, reboots, and re-installs. Why is this software so punishing?

Since I’m running Windows on Parallels on OS X, I took precautionary snapshots so I can test on IE 7 and IE 8 by reverting snapshots. A messy solution but it gets the job done. Microsoft recommend Virtual PC for this task. Forgive me if I’m not hopeful about anything Microsoft produces. Instead I’m hopeful about Cross Over which hopefully will run IE 7 and IE 8 on OS X in a couple of months. You can follow their friendly marketing dude, Jon Parshall, on Twitter.

In case you think the above catastrophe was all ignorance and kerfuffle on my part, I leave you with the results of the Acid3 Test run on Internet Explorer 8. I should mention that Safari 4 and Opera 10 both score 100% on this test.

Certainly a middle finger to standards, to web developers, and an Epic Fail in general.

Photo taken from Flickr

Building a successful business involves building a great team. I don't just mean a team of fabulous designers who can out-web-2.0-gradient-shiny-floor everyone else, or developers who can recite the Ruby String API from memory. I mean the people in the background - accountants, tax advisors, solicitors, the bank manager, financial planners, sales consultants.

We've been through a few of each and we're lucky to employ the services of a few great professionals. But there's probably one trait we look for above all when investing in a relationship with a professional - rapport. In other words, can we get along and have a laugh together? And I don't mean the freaky NLP mind control stuff.

I'll choose a professional who drives a Polo but can put me at ease with things like preliminary tax returns and B1 forms over one that drives a Porsche but only calls me 1 day before the end of year returns. Transparency, openness, competence, but above all rapport.

So if your tax advisor doesn't answer your emails or your accountant scares the hell out of you, it might be time to look elsewhere.

Because it's when you're having a coffee with your professional that you get the really great advice.

Kablingy attended FOWA Dublin. It was great to take a little excursion from doing the hustle to see what others are upto. My favourite talk was by Ryan Carson and his lessons selling web apps, based on the acquisition of DropSend.com. Noteworthy advice included:

• No free accounts! Although this point came in later in the talk, it stood out in my mind as the most important one. Users of the free account tend not to upgrade. There are other ways to entice the user such as allowing them to try out the product without any signup.

• Don’t build your own billing engine: I totally agree with this one. Building billing engines can be a quagmire, and I’d rather avail of another’s expertise. Ryan recommended spreedly.com and I shall definitely be checking them out. Notice the “You can set up and test everything with a free account – no strings attached!” wording on their website. I am now enticed. Notice the difference with another  SaaS company, OpSource (formally LeCayla) – “Contact us to discuss how we can get started”. Come on guys, I want to try your product but you’re not making it easy!

• Form a new company for your product: This is one that I hadn’t considered fully, but it makes total sense. It’s much easier to buy a seperate company than to untangle a product and integrate it into another company. The administration costs I’m sure would be cheaper in the long run.

• Invoicing: Send your customer a proper invoice. Ryan suggests using an online accounting solution called Xero.

• Charge in USD Dollars: This makes sense. There’s a much bigger market willing to pay in US Dollars, than in Euros. Exchange rates etc. should be taken into consideration.

• 1 click administration: To build up goodwill, Ryan recommends having admin features such as 1-click forgot password, 1 click refund, 1 click ‘give customer credits’ etc. He says it’s just not worth arguing with an unhappy customer, just give them the refund or $10 to sweeten them up if they’re unhappy. I like this idea a lot.

• Perform usability testing at the wireframe level: He recommends a wireframing tool called balsamiq. It looks very cool. Wireframe mockups in minutes. I shall be trying this one out too.

• Know your numbers and stats: One should know by heart the number of visits/day on your site, the cost per user, margins etc. Very true.

Contrast were entertaining and informative on their talk about conventions and when to use them and when to break them. Robin Christopherson reminded us of the importance of accessibility and the tyranny of captchas. DHH once again encouraged others to build an actual business, not based on VC funding and foosball antics, but one using his controversial business model:

Not sure a crazy idea like that could work in the real world!