Software Made Simple

For the past week I’ve been testing out an online subversion hosting service to use with REALbasic. It’s called Code Spaces.

I’ve set up Subversion on my office Mac several times, but I never found myself using it regularly. I think it was because I tend to work on my code from a lot of places and it wasn’t always convenient (or possible) to access the subversion repository sometimes.

I then saw a post by Floyd Price on the Business of Software forums about Code Spaces a couple months ago. I saved the URL and finally got around to checking it out last week and I thought I’d tell you about it.

Since Subversion is free, why would you consider paying someone to host subversion for you? For me, I like the fact that the code is hosted offsite from a backup perspective. It also makes it very simple for me to work on code anywhere I have internet access (I only need internet access to sync, after that I can work disconnected and then sync up when I’m on the net again). But the real kicker is that Code Spaces doesn’t just have subversion. It also has a full project management system with Work Items for bug tracking, a wiki and discussion forums. If you’re working on a multi-team project these things are all incredibly valuable, but I find wiki and work items useful even though I mostly work alone.

Although I’m not using it for this yet, I also think my clients will like having a single place to go to find out status of the project I’m working on. I’ve been using Basecamp for this, but I prefer Code Spaces; it better fits the way I do development. From experience, it’s very convenient to let your clients log their own bugs, discuss design in the forums and track documentation in the wiki rather than attempting to manage all this in e-mails. The only thing I don’t like right now is that there is no way to restrict user access to the source code. I generally prefer to not give my clients source code until everything has been paid in full. But Floyd tells me that this feature should be added in an update sometime this month. He’s also working on a work item API, which means I might be building a desktop app in REALbasic to enter work items!

So how does Code Spaces work? Easy as pie. After creating my account and first project, I then downloaded a Subversion client. There are quite a few for OS X, but so far I’m using the ZigVersion trial. It costs $100, but I think I’ll be purchasing it. I really like its clean interface. I tried svnX, but I find its UI confusing. I also tried RapidSVN, which for free is not bad.

Anyway, once you have the Subversion client installed you just give it the URL of your Code Spaces repository. The subversion client will synchronize quickly because the repository is empty and then you’re ready to get started. Now you need to “Check Out” the repository to a local working folder. I created a Source folder and clicked “Check Out” in ZigVersion. It defaulted to the name of my project as the folder to put everything in and then created a blank folder on my local drive in the Source folder I had previously created. I now put all my REALbasic files in this folder and they show up as new files in ZigVersion. I select these files and click “Add” to mark them to be added to the repository. Then I click “Check In” and they are copied over to Code Spaces. Done and done.

So far, Code Spaces has been extremely fast. For most of my projects, I’ve just checked in the REALbasic RBP file (since I’m usually the only developer), but I have also set up a project using the Version Control Project (VCP) format, which creates separate files for each REALbasic object, and had no trouble with that either.

I have had no problems pulling down code between Windows and Mac clients, at least when using the RBP format. I haven’t tried the VCP format, but I hear there might be some line ending problems when switching between platforms.

So, what does Code Spaces cost? It varies depending on what you need. For starters, you can get a free account with one project and up to 50MB of storage. That’s a great way to try it out and 50MB is a lot of source code. Paid plans then start at $10 for 1GB storage and 3 projects up to $90 for 10GB storage and unlimited projects. These are all monthly charges, by the way. I’m going with the $20 “Small Team” package that gives me 2GB storage and unlimited projects. That’s less than I’ve been paying for my BaseCamp account and I’ll get many more features for my money.

Update: Floyd wrote a blog post about the new features coming in Code Spaces 2.0, due by the end of February

A coworker of mine has started a MicroISV, QuoteSignal, that makes it easier to get yourself a merchant account.  Also check out the blog, which has some good information about merchant accounts.

Here in Maine, we are fortunate to have a strong technology association in the form of MESDA. Their 15th annual conference was held Nov 6 & 7th in South Portland and it was a huge success. The big news from the conference was that they changed their name from MESDA, which originally stood for Maine Software Developers Association, to the Technology Association of Maine or techMaine.

In August, LogicalVue Software officially became a member of techMaine. Take a look at our member page.

But back to the conference. This year it was a two day conference for the first time. On Tuesday (11/6) they had a variety of 1/2 day workshops. And on Wednesday, they had the usual conference with a keynote and 3 sessions in a variety of tracks. I attended both days.

On the first day, I went to the workshop on Rails development. There’s been a lot of buzz around this and I have a few coworkers recommend it to me, so I thought it would be good to learn a bit about it. It proved quite interesting. The presenter showed us how to build a simple application that could be used for blogging and then had us install Rails on our laptops and try to build the app ourselves. Some had it easier than others. Those working on Linux or Mac OS X were able to get Rails up and running pretty quickly. Those with Windows ended up spending the better part of an hour downloading and getting Rails set up and configured properly. Rails looks like a good framework. Ruby still looks a bit strange to me, though. And I’d really prefer to see some IDEs for working with both of them. I stopped using command lines a long time ago and I have no urge to go back.

The afternoon session was called “Advanced PHP”. I’ve played around a little bit with PHP (mostly to tweak the templates for various WordPress sites). The session was specifically about PHP5 and its new “advanced” object-oriented features. I found this session to be a bit boring. The features that were being described already exist in every other modern programming language, so other than seeing how it applied to PHP, there wasn’t much new for me.

The conference started the next day with an excellent keynote called “Staying ahead of the Avalanche: How everyone can benefit from near-infinite technology”. Essentially, the speaker (Frederick A. Hayes-Roth) spoke about how technology has evolved at an exponential pace and it is now reaching a point where order or magnitude changes can be expected. He noted that the cost of many things, such as storage, CPU power and network connectivity are heading towards being free.  He talked about how we would use all this power and then more specifically how would use all this information.  He noted how our current method of “pulling” information (such as by doing a Google search), will no longer work as the amount of information continues to increase.  Instead we need to utilize everything else he talked about to have much smarter “pushing” of information.  We should have information that is relevant and material to us, brought right to us rather than us trying to find it.

It was a very interesting talk and gave everyone a lot to think about.

The first session I went to was about Facebook. It’s really taken off in the last year, and I personally haven’t understood why. I have a Facebook account but rarely use it. This session covered Facebook itself and the new API for building Facebook applications. It was good to see how the API could be used to build something within Facebook and I may spend some time looking into it a bit more now. I’m still not entirely sure how to leverage it better, though.

After lunch, I attended the “Prototyping” session. In this session two types of prototyping were covered: Paper Prototypes and PDF Prototypes. The paper prototypes that were covered where more like “extreme paper prototyping” to me. The presenter recommended creating a paper prototype that would used by a user and controlled by a “human computer” who would manipulate the UI by changing screens, highlighting menus and showing error messages. All by hand. Frankly it seemed like a lot of effort for little benefit.

The PDF prototyping seemed more useful. One problem I’ve observed is when you use an actual development tool to build a prototype: it looks too real. The users think the app is almost done when they use the prototype. By using a PDF prototype, you can create an interactive prototype that is actually a PDF document. You need to use Adobe Acrobat to add buttons, fields and graphics but it it pretty easy to do it. I also liked it when they showed how to scan in a hand-drawn UI prototype and use Adobe Acrobat to make the drawn buttons clickable. To me, that was the best way to use a paper prototype.

The last session of the day that I attended was also on Rails. It was less in depth than the workshop I attended the previous day. It really focused on discussing Rails in general and didn’t get into any code examples. Apparently I’m not the only one that thinks Ruby is a bit odd, at least when coming from more typical languages such as Visual Basic, C#, Java or REALbasic.

All-in-all, I though this was an excellent conference this year. I applaud the organizers for adding a day or workshops. I look forward to watching and participating in techMaine’s growth.