I recently checked the progress on Ecommo, a business set up by an ex-colleague and friend Alex Barton. The idea behind Ecommo is to allow people to sell online but without the usual hassle, problems and expense this can cause.
Many people, myself included, might look for an open source (free) content management system (i.e. osCommerce), but that’s not exactly the easiest system to use and I’d probably find setting it up a bit of a pain. I’ve seen a few sites using osCommerce and it’s a reasonable solution but it doesn’t eliminate the need for some geeks to install and set it up.
Ecommo aims to make selling online a lot easier. You don’t have to download and install it, you don’t have to pay a designer to build a template for it to look good, you don’t need to worry about servers going offline and taking your shop with it and it doesn’t take weeks to get it online. What it does do is provide is an easy to use solution which allows the owner to get on with the actual selling.
I’m really impressed with the progress Ecommo has made and it’s good to see they’re already attracting customers. If you’re after a professional online shop solution, Ecommo is definitely worth a look.
Update: Since writing this, Ecommo has shifted focus towards holiday accommodation providers. Good luck in your new direction guys!
So it turns out that I was on to a good idea with my iPhone app. The problem is that on the 6th Feb someone else released exactly what I had in mind. They even used the same open source libraries as I was going to use. That’s the second time in recent months when someone else has beaten me to it. Unfortunately there isn’t much opportunity to differentiate my app from what exists, with a similar approach and functionality the only room for improvement is simply charging less. The underlying problem with accuracy is the quality of the iPhone camera and it’s lens, but that’s something only Apple can really fix. The amateur (me) going after the software company with a “me-too” product isn’t going to work, so it’s back to the drawing board.
Haiku, the operating system (not the poetry) aims to pick up where BeOS left off. BeOS was an operating system for personal computers created in the 1990’s. It was famed for it’s ability to multitask and it’s many other ground breaking features. Whilst it wasn’t based on any of the more familiar alternatives to Windows (such as Linux) it was positioned as a competitor in this market. In the days before Mac OS X, Apple’s current operating system family, it was hoped by many (including Be Inc) that they would be purchased by Apple and their future OS would be built on BeOS. This didn’t happen, Apple bought NeXT in 1996 and a few years later Palm bought Be.
Whilst this is all very interesting it doesn’t explain Haiku. The goal of the project is to recreate BeOS and extend it, bringing it up to date whilst still being compatible with BeOS and it’s existing suite of software. I really don’t see any benefit to Haiku, other than a curiosity of a system kept alive by loyal fans, but with it being freely available to try I thought I’d see what it was like.
Not only is it easy to try Haiku it’s also completely free. I downloaded my favourite virtual machine programme – VirtualBox, the latest Haiku test image (VMware images work in VirtualBox), created a new virtual machine gave it at least 128MB of RAM told it to use the VMware disk image as the hard disk and pressed Start.
I didn’t do much art at school on account of not being very good at it so I appreciate a cheat when I see one. Recently I’ve been learning to programme Objective-C with a view to creating my own app for the App Store. Through that I decided that I should mock up the various stages of my application, and although I’m not trying to impress any investors I though I’d make use of an iPhone GUI components file for Photoshop.
The end result looks pretty good and didn’t take much time or effort. Sure, it’s just the unlock screen but I don’t want to give my idea away!
Firstly I’m going to be honest, I’m a mac fanboy. I love my MacBook Pro and the Operating System (OS) it comes with but I was also really interested to see first hand what the upcoming version of Windows was like. Whilst Microsoft have only allowed normal users (not in their developer network) to download this legally since last Friday (09/01/2009) there has been dodgy versions on BitTorrent for a while but I’m a patient kinda chap.
I haven’t really used Windows Vista (they’re current operating system) much and find it very different from Windows XP (and not in a good way). Large companies such as Intel are refusing to upgrade their computers to Vista and along with a number of users want to hold out till the next OS update in the hope it will fix the many reported problems.
Windows 7 is still in Beta, which for the uninitiated means in the final stages of development but still containing bugs (try telling that to Google). Beta software isn’t meant for the end user and is normally restricted to members of a developers network who want to either use the beta to ensure their applications work in Windows 7 or to help find and fix bugs. Microsoft seems to be using this as a marketing offensive to prove that they have a capable new OS in the pipeline and allay peoples fears that this is going to be as bad as Vista. It certainly has to be the smoothest Beta experience I’ve ever had, with still no crashes or other glitches. Microsoft have a lot to prove and they seem to be doing an all right job at it so far.
