Tiller Software » Jason

Feedback tool added to Windows application

Jason — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:00:58 +0000

We have added our tools to a third party Windows application that is due for launch in March. The tool allows users of the application to provide feedback as well as a screen capture of the application. The users will be able to draw on the screen capture to highlight their feedback.

The product is still under wraps but when it is released, we will give more information about it and how our Capture2Web technology is helping get customer feedback.

Overhaul of UI, blogs and forums

Jason — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:54:59 +0000

We have spent the last month sorting out the UI of our websites and making them easier to use. Each product now has a fresh new website along with their own forum and blogs. We think that this approach is more sensible as it allows users of our products to go directly to the information that is relevant to the product that they use.

WebReview.Me – Take screen capture to the next level with WebReview.Me which is a communication and collaboration tool for your project.

BugFeeder – BugFeeder allows annotated screen captures to be sent directly to your existing bug/issue tracking system. Check out BugFeeder.com.

PrintScreen.Me – Send images directly to Twitter, Facebook, Picasa and Flickr. Check out our free screen capture tool at PrintScreen.me.

G1 Mobile

Jason — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:23:42 +0000

I got the new G1 mobile the other day. It is impressive but not really a business phone at the moment would go back to my Windows mobile except for one application which gives SSH access to our servers and that tops the Windows mobile. Everything is slicker, but the operating system needs to be linked to a Google email account which is pretty annoying when you have your own email account. The email does not update frequently enough, where as Windows Mobile is instantaneous if linked to an exchange account.

However, with the operating system being open source, it is hard on the heels of the iPhone OS and will over take it at some point in the future. It is a phone to stick with but needs a lot more business functionality before I would recommend to any business user.

Windows Mobile

Jason — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:03:11 +0000

Windows Mobile in its original format is pretty useless, but if you can get your hands on a modified version then it begins to excel as a business phone. It only works well with an Exchange account of which they are many suppliers where you rent an account and normally get a licenced copy of MS Outlook thrown in. This means that all your emails, contacts, calendar and todo items instantaneously synchronise between your phone and desktop and vice versa with no extra software.

The problem for most people is that they have a windows mobile phone with the default settings which is based upon the same principles as a desktop. This does not apply to a phone and the interface needs to be simpler and usable with a finger instead of using a stylus. IphoneOS obviously has moved the goal posts and the up and coming Android OS from Google will as well. But some of the mods to Windows Mobile are worth a look.

Deploying our web app

Jason — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:59:02 +0000

So we have got a web application in Rails that we need to deploy. The standard convention is to use Capistrano. Like most things in Rails (due to using the Windows platform), it doesn’t quite work out of box but with a little tweaking, it is brilliant. We can now deploy to our servers in seconds at the click of a button. This is how deployment should be done.

When using Microsoft ASP.Net, we would have to check that all the developers had checked in, then compile for 20 minutes, create a setup file, ftp the file to the server, check that no one was logged in (as this generally stopped the installation), run the installer for 5 minutes and then check that nothing was broken and if it was spend 30 minutes rolling everthing back by hand.

Now one of us just presses an icon on our toolbar which runs a batch file, asking which installation we want to install, put in the server password and 30 seconds later the web app is up. Worth its weight in gold and allows the testers to have fast version turn arounds.