There are many products that simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an enabling technology or service. I am designing a pivot strategy for @ExumaTech that could revolutionize the way owners of late model cars, trucks, boats and RVs communicate with their dealers. One of the risk factors I’ve identified is the dependence this solution will have on dealer management systems (DMS). If the link between this app and the DMS breaks, no more value to customers.

Being dependent upon another technology is very different than simply providing another interface to an existing product or service, or adding new functionality. There are thousands of products that add a missing feature to popular services like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. The Twitter “auto-reply” products are a good example. If the giants cough, the enablement technologies can either catch a cold or worse yet become irreparably broken.The legion of Twitter auto-responders are a good example of this. When and if Twitter releases this feature, so much for those products.

There is another class of products like Market Samurai that help people improve efficiencies by coalescing and organizing data from numerous sources and presenting it to the user in a common interface. A good example of this is HootSuite. Like Market Samurai, HootSuite is a great service because it helps us manage our social media activities across multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. Twitter and Facebook have published APIs in their services to enable companies like HootSuite and thousands to create valuable products. This of course bolsters the value of those services and creates an ecosystem of developers and designers promoting those services.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the giants (Google) coughed and it seriously disrupted the service provided by Market Samurai. Many companies that don’t have an open and honest relationship with their customers and the blogosphere would have hidden from these issues while their customers suffered. Worse yet they could have blamed Google for all of their problems in one simple blog post and then gone silent while they paniked behind closed doors. However Market Samurai did what any company operating in our open socially engaged world would do – they threw the doors open to conversation with their customers, fans and ditracters. That door was left open 24-hours a day through the weekend and into the following week.  Eugene Ware, their CEO, lays it all out on the line here. Bravo!

My Adventures in iOS Land have stalled. Why? Because I’ve been diving into HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery Mobile. The requirements for the app I am developing seem to be more suited for mobile website rather than a native app. I am developing a business app that connects to server code running on either a Linux or Windows-based server. The connection method is a SOAP web service. Thanks to Mateo Casati for his excellent post on SOAP clients using AJAX. We have adapted this code to work with an ASP.NET web service. We also created a wrapper around Mateo’s foundation that allows for cross-domain calls.

JQuery Mobile has proven to be an adequate platform for the user experience I want to create thus far. I am only at the beginning of this project and may need to look at PhoneGap or some other kind of solution to migrate what I’ve done on the web to a native app if native controls become necessary. Eventually I want to explore using the XCode Interface Designer as a mobile layout platform. There are some tools out there that claim to convert the .xib files produced by Xcode to Javascript files. Has anyone had success taking this route?

In May of 2010, I described a play that my wife and I saw about ADHD and the way it moved us. My son has ADHD. ADHD is both a wonderful gift and a burden. If one can manage to control the negative effects (impulsivity, hyperactivity, forgetfulness, aloofness, and the obsessive/compulsive traits) the benefits are remarkable. People with ADHD tend to have a higher degree of creativity, logic and reasoning capacity, objectiveness and quick recall.

In children these positive traits are often masked because the child can’t seem to focus long enough to allow these to gifts blossom in the classroom. The lack of focus tends to be coupled with a number of anti-social behaviors like sudden outbursts, impulsivity and a lack of regard for people’s space.

We are very open in our household about ADHD. My son is aware that he has it, and although it frustrates him to no end, we refer to it as a “gift”. He is not the most popular kid in the class and is often embarrassed by things he does that appear to be out of his control or just plain weird. The act of him sitting through a one-hour mass is torture (I guess it can be for a lot of people…), but he tries. We’ve found little things that will help him cope when circumstances require him to be still, calm and focused. He will carry some silly putty in his hand and squeeze it to release tension and energy. When he was younger we found that brushing his arms and legs at night before bed or putting books on his lap or chest calmed him down.

We have found for our son that a well rounded “coping” program (I can’t bring myself to use the word “treatment”) is the most effective. Aside from taking Straterra, my son attends neurofeedback training once per week. This program has had some positive results thus far. To fall asleep at night my son was dependent upon Clonidine. He now no longer needs it and falls asleep naturally around 9pm on a school night. The neurofeedback is also helping him calm down.

This week my son was extremely disappointed that he sat the bench during his final basketball game at school. Like me when I was his age, he struggles with team sports. I think physical ability varies widely among those with ADHD, but in general it seems that individual sports are better suited for my son. Michael Phelps has ADHD and is regarded as one of best athletes of our time. My son was clearly frustrated about being a bench warmer this season. I can take some blame for not working with him much on his dribbling and jump shots. Many fathers dream of having a son that wants to go outside, play catch, shoot some hoops, etc. That’s not my son. Although we are beginning to notice a change. He is now becoming more interested in riding his bike and shooting hoops. He can’t do it for very long, but at least the desire is there.

Yesterday my son was given the highest honor in his fifth grade class for academic achievement. He maintained a 90% or above average in the first semester. Starting in fifth grade he began to take school very seriously. This was completely self imposed. He really drives himself at school and has worked his ass off this semester. We couldn’t be more proud.

If you are a parent of a child with ADHD, the best advice I can give you is to be open with it. Remind your child that they have a gift, but along with that gift comes some negative side effects that people won’t like. Prepare them for the comments that will come from friends and peers. Help them find coping tools. Listen and be understanding. Finally, take a holistic approach to this because it takes a family.

My first day digging into Titanium didn’t quite turn out like I had planned. Setting up XCode (once I received by Apple Developer Program credentials) and Titanium Studion was very straight-forward. I am using Xcode 4.2 and Titanium Studio 1.0.7. I also installed the Android SDK. The help and SDK installers seem to have improved since I tried installing Titanium on Windows XP.

Appcelerator has done a great job preparing tutorials and videos in what they call AppU. Three starter videos are provided upon installation: Preparing for Mobile Development, Getting Started with the Development Environment and Sample Projects.

My first project is a business app. I’ve already created the basic prototype using jQuery Mobile. You can find it here. This app will communicate with a .NET XML SOAP web service running on a Windows Server. Since we are developing mobile apps to facilitate business management systems, it is key that the app work with a web service supporting Windows business applications. Given this backdrop, it became apparent that I needed to bone up on SOAP, Javascript and jQuery.

I bought the jQuery Cookbook some time ago, but hadn’t cracked the cover until recently. I started working through the basic examples to get an understanding of jQuery and Javascript basics. You can find the tutorials here. I then started looking specifically at jQuery client side examples using AJAX to communicate with an XML SOAP web service. Here are some that were helpful to me:

Posting XML SOAP Requests with jQuery

Using AJAX with jQuery Mobile

Creating a Javascript Soap Client

Even though I’ve made much less progress that I had hoped, I’ve learned a lot about jQuery and SOAP. On our Windows server I am using a slick testing environment called SoapUI. Blogger Jason Cohen is involved in this project and I’d like to give him a big shout out for not only helping to create a great tool, but for writing some great posts on the business of software.

This is an email I sent to my company (@ExumaTech) this morning outlining our focus for 2012. I am reading “The Lean Start-up” by Eric Ries if you can’t tell:

Happy New Year Everyone -

2011 was a good year for Exuma. Through the collective hard work of everyone on the team we had a profitable year and we were able to share the fruits of our labor with everyone. 2012 can be an even better year for us. We must continue to be vigilant about maintaining healthy profit margins and doing the right thing for our customers.

At Exuma we not only want to be profitable and “wow” our customers, but we want to build a sustainable business. This is done using an iterative methodology called “Build – Measure – Learn”. It’s really simple. We turn ideas into products, we measure how our customers (existing and future) like them, then we decide whether to keep it, or chuck it and try something different. We should focus on being able to speed up the cycle and get feedback quickly so we can make adjustments quickly.

Our big development initiative this year is 7.0. You might think that the feedback loop on 7.0 would be a long cycle. Actually I would be a big mistake on our part if it was. Although it is not likely that we will be releasing 7.0 in 2012, we must continue to get feedback both internally and from customers on what it is we are building. One of the mistakes we identified in the TPOS project was not getting feedback early enough in the development cycle. Development tried to make special orders and returns work just like the old POS. Lots of time was wasted working on functionality that was clumsy and initially no one thought to rethink the process and gather feedback. We lost nine months due to the absence of a good feedback loop.

Outside of 7.0, our two main initiatives in 2012 will be hosted (DockMaster in the cloud) and mobile. We are working to bring the cost of our hosted solution down so we can be more competitive and profitable. We are going to stumble and make mistakes as we define the best hosted solution for our customers. That’s Ok. It’s part of the process.

Our mobile initiative is focused on delivering very light weight apps for both smartphones and tablets that will allow our customers to access their DockMaster database while they are on the move. The idea here is NOT to bring new functionality to the mobile platform, instead we want to give our customers some of the core DockMaster features on a mobile device. These apps should be lightweight and the cycle time to develop them should be relatively short. I’ve been working on a prototype that simply allows someone to create a customer and retrieve customer information. Customers want light weight easy to use solutions for their employees. This is evident from the popularity of ThreeClix. Reselling someone else’s product is fine for things that we don’t have core expertise in, like CRM. But we must also build on our own strengths which are accounting, service, inventory and storage. If you haven’t done so already, go to http://mobile.dockmaster.com from your smartphone. This is not what the end product will look like, it’s only a prototype to help us learn these new technologies and get customer feedback.

2012 can be a very exciting year for us. I have no idea what the economy will bring, but we can continue to control and improve upon our own situation. It starts with each one of us. It starts with the attitude we bring to work each morning. Each of us has a choice to be either a shining light or a cynic? I am hopeful that the team will grow together and prosper in 2012!

Best,

Cam

As I am waiting for XCode 4.2 to download on my new iMac I decided to chronicle my experience. This series of posts will outline my journey in what is a brave new world for me: iOS Development. Since developing cross platform apps is a key requirement for my work in mobile app creation, I’ve elected (as of this writing) to use Appcelerator. First a little background on me.

I am 47 years old. In the iOS development space this puts me in the senior citizen category. I run a company with 24 employees that generates millions per year in revenue. I graduated in electrical and computer engineering decades ago. My first job out of college was at Motorola developing in assembler. That lasted all of 18 months before I decided that sales and consulting engineering was the place for me. With that backdrop, why the hell would I attempt this.

The answer is two fold really: 1). I like tinkering. I’ve been doing adhoc web development (HTML, CSS) and maintaing various sites developed in Django, JQuery and PHP. 2). I believe that if you have chosen technology as your journey in this life you had better walk the walk. In other words, if building and marketing technology products and services is your craft, then you’d better know the ins and outs of what it is you are peddling.

I have no delusions here that I am going to become a master programmer. I wasn’t that good at it when I got paid to do it. I will likely pay someone to develop the complex pieces of the projects I create (e.g database backend, interactive graphics, complex UI functions). However I believe I need to know and be in competent using the tools of the trade. It’s like the guy that has a woodworking shed behind his house. For him it’s a fun hobby. He is not dependent upon woodworking to make a living. But if someone loves their craft and gets good at it they may be able to sell some of their creations in the local swap meet. I am a believer in the notion that many successful businesses, especially those that Tim Ferriss calls muse businesses, come from a hobbyist that turns their labor of love into marketable art form.

Well I believe that XCode is downloaded now, so here goes…

I resisted the notion of buying a Mac for a long time. I own a business software company. All of our products are built on Microsoft technology. My migration away from Unix-based systems to Windows happened back in the mid-90s when I began to actively seek employment with a company that had business applications (specfically software development business apps) that ran on Windows NT. I didn’t realize that one day, more than 15-years later I would come full cycle and embrace Unix-based operating systems once again. What surprised me is that the transition happened at home.

On nights and weekends I began to dive into what was happening in the open source community. I am an investor in Eldarion, one of the leading Django development companies anywhere and developer of the open source Pinax framework. I used Pinax and Django on our DzineBox website. I maintained this site on an old IBM Thinkpad running Ubuntu. Since DzineBox is written in Django, Ubuntu (or any variant of Linux for that matter) made for an ideal development platform. But it wasn’t until I decided to start focusing on mobile app development that my need for MacOS grew to the point that I finally had to shell out the $1,200 for an iMac.

Now look at me. I am definitely late to the party but with my iMac, iPad and iPhone, I’m like an Apple commercial. I am using the Trackpad with my iMac and really like it so far. Not sure if it’s more effecient than a mouse yet, but it is really intuitive. So far I wouldn’t say that owning a Mac is transforamtional. Some people talk about these Zen like experiences they have when they get their first Mac. However I had the original Macintosh and many of the fundamental concepts are still in place. Furthermore, since I already use the iPad and iPhone, the UI was seemlessly for me. I know some people who only have experience with Windows platforms really struggle with the Mac.

I was using Appcelerator on my Windows XP machine in an attempt to start working with the Android SDK. It took some effort just to get it to work. But after it crashed my machine when I uploaded an update to the Android SDK I said enough. I will give Appcelerator a good college try on the iMac, but if it also proves flaky I am off to XCode and my dreams of building cross platform apps will be dashed (at least for the time being).

I developed my first mobile app prototype using Jquery Mobile (http://jquerymobile.com/) after spending lots of time reading threads about building webforms vs native mobile apps. Since the app is basically a mobile interface to my company’s server side business management system, webforms seemed to be the way to go.

Grab an iPhone or Droid and to go this URL from your browser to see my first attempt at it here: (http://mobile.dockmaster.com). The great thing about JQuery Mobile is that it was built in HTML5 and CSS3 from the ground up to be touch/swipe enabled as opposed to point/click. It also renders to different form factors from iPad (largest) to Blackberry (smallest). The problem (for me) was load times. I found that it worked great on my new iPhone 4S but load times are a dog on older devices (e.g. iPhone 3G).

So after attending the Launch Pad conference in CA that Jason Calacanis organized and after speaking with a number of top app developers, I decided to install Titanium (Appcelerator). Appcelerator is basically a customized version of Eclipse. I installed it on a Windows machine (because that’s all I have at the moment) and started messing with the Andriod SDK. I will be loading on MacOS over the Holidays.

Installing on Windows has some known configuration issues that took me days to figure out. NOTE: I am using it on Windows XP, haven’t tried on Windows 7 yet.Read these threads and save yourself a shit-pile of time if you use Windows:

FIRST check out: http://developer.appcelerator.com/doc/mobile/mobile-build-windows (You don’t have to install Python and Git but it’s highly recommended. I personally love Git. I keep all my Dev stuff in GitHub.com. Also, having “Git Bash” allows you to use Unix commands in Windows!)

Problem #1: Appcelerator and more specifically the Android SDK has trouble with the Windows file system. It doesn’t take kindly to spaces.  The SDK typically gets installed in “Program Files”. This path name must be converted to “PROGRA~1″.http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638713/android-emulator-is-not-…

Problem #2: Emulator couldn’t find path to SDCard. This may or may not happen to you. But if it does here’s how to fix it. http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/124530/how-do-i-manually…

Lastly – Tim Poulsen at Titanium is a good resource.http://developer.appcelerator.com/question/112621/adb-devices-retur…

After a few more email back and forth with Apple iTunes Support (which only seem to be available during working hours in India) I was able to resolve the iTunes issue I had with the missing songs. A gentleman named Naresh in Apple’s Support Group actually replaced the songs diredctly into my account.

Thank you Apple for resolving this. Here is the email thread:

Dear Cam,

Cam

Like most people I enjoy games and fun apps on the iPad. But to me the iPad is more than just a toy or entertainment console. I seek out business apps that help me be more efficient and stay connected. These are the iPad apps that I use almost daily to run my business and my daily life. I have not included the “base” apps like Email, Calendar, Safari and Contacts. Those are the staples. (Note: Some are fun apps. All work and no play makes Cam a dull boy).
 

NoteTaker HD – I credit this app with moving the needle for me on the iPad from “toy” to “essential”. I have since discovered many more great apps, but this app replaced all of my random notes, notebooks and scraps of paper I used to keep track of my life.

Pages – This is the iPad version of Apple’s desktop Pages document processor. Elegant and easy to use. Had some trouble at first making the transition from being an MS-Word user to Pages, but Mac users will have no problem.

Evernote – I use Evernote on my PC constantly, so having it now on my iPad made me that much more efficient. Some limitations compared to the PC version, like being able to “Evernote” a page directly from Safari.

Dropbox – This tool also has become my family’s defacto insurance policy. We use Dropbox on both our Windows and Ubuntu laptops, as well as our iPhones and my iPad. Its just works!

GoodReader – A great general purpose file reader that can be launched from many applications. I use it a lot on conjunction with Dropbox when I want to read and or email a document.

GoToMeeting – We use GoToMeeting in my company all the time for sales presentations, conference call with partners and for basic training. Their iPad app is a great extension of a valuable service.

Yelp – I am new to Yelp but I have found it extremely useful while on the road.

Realizer – Just started using Realizer to take schematics that I create in NoteTaker HD and make them come alive. It’s a great prototyping tool to help me conceptulize an app prior to writing the first line of HTML or CSS.

Textastic Code Editor – Kind of a geek tool, but it allows me to edit any text file while on the road. If I have to make a hot fix to a website or even write some code (in a limited fashion) I could. Still haven’t found an FTP product I really like though. Will Eclipse ever be avail for the iPad?

Steinway Etude – An iPad app from a 150-year old company? You bet! This app allows people to learn piano pieces that they download from their libary of “sheet music”. It’s a good user interface and an ingenious idea based off of the Kindle model.