Very close to release

I am just finishing up the last examples before we release our latest add on to our preferred development environment Runtime Revolution. This add on will let you draw beautyful charts easiely. Much needed.

Closer to release

It is the same with every project. The closer it comes to release, the liklier it is you break the thing. Today is such a breaking day, so release should not be too far away from now... We´ll see

Best marketing call ever!

Just got a call. A guy, I suspect him to be in his 60ies, just called to offer me an advertising opportunity. In the neighbourhood my office is located 2 new trashcans will be installed. Know what? Those things are speaking! They offered me to add my company details to the speaking trashcan. is actively participating in environment protection. People have ideas.

I hate my dyslexic fingers!

Boy oh boy...

Here I am writing SQL the whole day and wonder why nothing works. (For those of you who wonder what SQL is, you really do not want to know) It turns out, nothing works because my fingers leave out relevant information while scripting away. If you are missing chars in an SQL query, it is no wonder the table is not found.

*sigh*

In memoriam Eric Chatonet

I just learned that our collegue, competitor and internet friend Eric Chatonet passed away last wednesday. This is really sad news. I had the chance to meet Eric in real live on Malta in 2006. A true fun guy to hang around with. I will remember smoking way too many cigarettes with him, while discussing all things related to the Development tool, we both worked with. But he wasn´t only a very humourous person, but also a very bright programmer. He gave so much to our developer community. My thoughts are with his son and family.

We will miss Eric!

It´s been a while

Hi,

it has been a while since I last posted here. That was due to the downside of being an independent developer. No one is doing the paperwork for you. Well, in our case that is not necessariely true, as we have outsourced our book keeping. It just makes more sense to let somebody do the work who knows what they are doing :)

Still, we need to collect every piece of paper somebody gave us and pass it along to the bookworms. However, we only need to do this every 3 months, so that is risky business. If you take your average computer geek, s/he will not be very good at such things. Money is a necessary evil. All you will want to do is write cool stuff. Even though we are very organized in our work and usually are pretty good at math, we do not like the number crunching that is necessary to make a living. Period. That´s what we have to learn and seriously, it is not a work one must enjoy. Really not. If someone is asking you to write a program for you, the truely independed developer will always rate the coolness factor higher than the monetary compensation. We still nedd to eat and do support our families though, so do not expect us to work for free. However, while working with new people you always learn new things (thank you Carsten. I love the whiteboard :) )

This year we must get the numbers right! Not that there would be a reason to complain about the last three years. We did get some nice apps out of the door and had the pleasure to work with quite some nice people on very interesting projects. This year we are growing though. In the times of the economical breakdown, this is extraordiary news. I will try to keep you up to date with what is happening over here.

Until next time!

Malte

Colorconverter - a nifty tool

Economy-x-Talk has released a new version of the low-cost color conversion tool Color Converter. This little utility converts color codes. Available formats are RGB, CMYK, HSV, HEX (HTML colors) and RAL. This is very useful, if you are into WEB design, coding or design in general. Color Converter calculates color values from a selected color space into a number of other color spaces. Included are CMYK, HEX/HTML, HSV, RAL, RGB and XYZ. Color Converter displays an RGB-based brightness value, along with the color encodings. Color Converter also has a color picker, which allows you to get the color value of any pixel and any window of any program on your screen. The software is available for MS Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.3 and higher, and Linux.

Make sure to check it out!