Radiant Core

Radiant Core Acquired by Zerofootprint Software, Inc.

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

We've been in stealth mode for a few weeks now while all the details worked themselves out, but now that the cat's out of the proverbial bag, we can happily announce that we have, indeed, been acquired by Zerofootprint Software, Inc!

Effective basically immediately, our team is moving over to become the in-house crew responsible for building all of Zerofootprint's products, including the Kids and Youth Calculator, the One Minute Calculators, the Facebook Calculator, and the Personal Carbon Manager. We have a few great projects to wrap up before everyone trades in their old Radiant Core punch cards for their shiny new Zerofootprint ones, so keep an eye out for a few more announcements on this very blog.

Longer term, we're happy to announce that we've been working really hard to find a home for all of our great clients and we're delighted that The Jonah Group will be taking over from us on some of our accounts. We're still working out some of the specifics, but they're an excellent shop and we're really delighted that we can end our professional services practice on such a high note. We've spoken to all of our clients and they've been very congratulatory and supportive, which just goes to show that we really did have the best customers a firm could ask for.

For all of you Foundation users out there, we're also thrilled to announce that we'll be releasing the full product under and Open Source license, with the Jonah Group picking up the bulk of the ongoing maintenance and development. We're still weighing a few Open Source license options (though we're leaning toward the Mozilla Public License), so if you have a favourite please leave a comment below.

This is one of those rare deals which is truly a win-win for both sides, and I know I speak for Ron and the whole team at Zerofootprint, as well as for Michael and the Radiant Core crew, when I say that we are all very much looking forward to saving the world together. We've spent the last four and a half years building websites and web applications, and although we've had a wonderful time and worked on some great projects, very few of them served an altruistic purpose beyond promoting a product or selling more widgets. We're now in the very enviable position of knowing that each feature we spec, each line of code we craft, and each bug we squash brings us that much closer to reducing the world's CO2 footprint. I don't know about you, but that's pretty inspiring for me. Keep an eye on the Zerofootprint site for some big changes over the coming months, and we'll see you at the next DemoCamp, Rails Pub Night, CaseCamp, TransitCamp, etc.

Zerofootprint City of Toronto Carbon Calculator Launch

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:00:00 GMT

One of our favourite clients, Zerofooprint, launched a great initiative with the City of Toronto at a very well covered press conference this morning. They've partnered together to release a customized version of their amazing Personal Carbon Manager, targeted at all of the citizens of our great city. You'll find it at http://toronto.zerofootprint.net and can jump in and start calculating today.

I had the privilege of attending this morning's press event and live Twittered, so if you'd like to know more about what was said, see my Twitterstream. Press coverage is starting to appear (the Toronto Star is up with Website measures local carbon footprints), and watch the news tonight for footage from CBC and Citytv, both of whom sent camera crews. Mayor Miller apparently loves it and was there to say lots of nice things, which is always a good endorsement. Check it out for yourself!

Our Very Own Martin

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:00:00 GMT

It's not every day that you get to see your name mentioned in a John C. Dvorak column, and it's even rarer when he has something positive to say about you. We're all teary eyed over our very own Martin's ascent to celebrity source status. Congrats!

DemoCampToronto17

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 23:00:00 GMT

After much voting and discussion, and a few days late (of course!), we're very, very pleased to announce the lineup for DemoCamp17, happening on Monday, February 25th, at the Board of Trade. Please note that all times are approximate and subject to the inevitable technical snafus.

6:00pm
Demo: AskItOnline.com (Kaitlyn McLachlan, Clear Sky Media, http://www.askitonline.com)

6:15pm
Demo: GigPark (Pema Hegan, Noah Godfrey, http://www.gigpark.com)

6:30pm
Demo: Mono Project .NET Development on a Mac (Geoff Norton, http://www.mono-project.com/)

6:45pm
Demo: PlanetEye (Butch Langlois, http://www.planeteye.com)

7:00pm
Demo: SceneCaster (Alain Chesnais, http://www.scenecaster.com)

7:15pm
20 minute break

7:35pm
Ignite: The Future Is Simple (Geo Perdis, http://mediaworks.ca/)

7:50pm
Social Services Mashup (Clara Severino, UofT, Partnership)

8:05pm
How to Rock SXSW (Rannie Turingan, http://PhotoJunkie.ca)

8:20pm
The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks (Tom Purves, http://wirelessnorth.ca/)

8:35pm
Leveraging Wide Open (Mike Beltzner, http://www.mozilla.com)

8:40pm
20 minute wrap up and social

9:00pm - 11:00pm
Duke of Westminster (http://westminster.thedukepubs.ca/) will have finger foods for us and is staying open an extra hour so you can get your drink on :)

Firefox 3: Meet the New Features

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:20:00 GMT

It's always been a pleasure for us to be involved in the Mozilla Firefox project — we did the design and implementation of the official theme for Firefox 2 — so we feel the excitement pretty keenly when they start preparing a new release. The Mozco engine is humming along and you better start prepping your Firefox themed party treats, because Firefox 3 is almost here!

We didn't have a chance to work on this release, but we're really looking forward to a whole bunch of the new features. There's a great rundown on Mozilla Links' A Deeper Look at Firefox 3 (even if they did call our work "washed out" :), which is well worth the read if your browser blood runs red. Some of our favourites:

The Proto native theme for Mac OS will finally give Firefox a truly platform native feel on our favourite operating system
A number of changes to the toolbar and tabstrip which make a lot of sense from the perspective of optimizing the browser experience (the Go button is gone! Let the rejoicing begin!)
Places, which will bring some sanity to our extensive bookmarks collections
Blocking JavaScript from resizing windows without permission (and various other nefarious message control tactics â take that marketeers!)
Our good friend Madhava's awesome work on the Add Ons manager which brings browsing and installation of Add Ons right into the browser chrome. It's about time!
Our other good friend Johnathan's equally awesome work around security, site verification, and anti-phishing measures, summed up in Larry the Security Guy.

Beta 3 is out right now if you want to grab it and start playing. We're told that over 40% of popular Add Ons have been updated to work in it, but we're still holding out for a new version of Firebug before we make the switch entirely. I've got to go dig up my recipe for Foxy Cupcakes and find the punch bowl before the big fete, so you run along now and remember: don't hurt the web!

DemoCamp17: It's Alllllive!

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 23:10:00 GMT

It is once again time for us to congregate and make with the demos and the drinking. Yes folks, that's right. It's DemoCamp17!

Date: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Location: Toronto Board of Trade, 1 First Canadian Place, Toronto, ON
Cost: Free (cash bar if you're thirsty)

Dinner will be served, the Demos will be excellent, the Ignites will ignite, and then we'll adjourn to The Duke of Westminster for more food and drinks.

As always, details are available at on the BarCamp's DemoCampToronto17 page, 'tickets' are at Eventbrite, and those wishing to sign up for a demo or ignite session can do so via the Wufoo DemoCamp form.

We've seen a lot of turnover at recent DemoCamps and we're always happy to welcome new faces into the crowd. Since this is the first DemoCamp of 2008, we're going to change the old "bring a new person" rule around a bit and ask everyone to "bring a new person AND an old friend who hasn't been out in a while". Things have changed a lot since our humble beginnings around the BubbleShare board room table, so let's bring them back and show them what's new!

Lastly, we're always looking for individuals or companies who would like to put up $200 and help make the event possible. If you're interested, please contact me directly and I can give you a rundown of what's involved.

Hope to see everyone there!

SciBarCamp: March 15th and 16th 2008

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 18:30:00 GMT

There have been regular BarCamps (and FooCamps), DemoCamps, WineCamps, and TransitCamps. There's even been talk of a CampCamp (though not this CampCamp, which is also cool)! Just when you thought we'd run out of campspiration, our good friend ~~Greg Wilson~~ (Update: Ooops! Greg isn't organizing, just promoting. Apologies to Eva Amsen, Jen Dodd, and Jamie McQuay, who are all honorary good friends too!) have announced SciBarCamp:

SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists, artists, and technologists for a weekend of talks and discussions. It will take place at Hart House at the University of Toronto on the weekend of March 15-16.

Bringing the academic and entrepreneurial communities together is one of Greg's big passions and this event is a clear move in that direction. Should be a lot of fun! Plus, it's sponsored by our friends at MindTouch who make the awesome DekiWiki, and if past evenings out with AaronF and the crew are any indication, this should be good! Hopefully they'll make it up for the weekend.

Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Online Publishers

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 09:00:00 GMT

Our good friend Will Pate has a great presentation on Guerrilla Marketing Tactics for Online Publishers from nextMedia - Monetizing Digital Media. It's a handful of spot on tips for online promotion we recommend to all our clients.

Harvard Business Review Breakthrough Idea: Toronto TransitCamp

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:00:00 GMT

There are magazines about business, and then there's the Harvard Business Review. If you're at all involved in doing business in the western world, odds are you've read an article from HBR or even have a subscription. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a whole generation of thought and business leaders have been shaped by the content HBR has published. And so, along with my co-authors Eli Singer and Mark Kuznicki, it is my incredible honour to annouce the publication of our article, titled Sick Transit Gloria, in the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008 section of the February issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Our short piece shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience. We're in great company and I highly recommend you take a few mintues from your busy day to read through some of the articles on the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008 site. We'd also love if you would take an additional moment (we're so needy!) to vote for TransitCamp in the Best Unconference in BlogTO's Best of Independent Toronto Poll.

For those of you who aren't familiar with TransitCamp, our article tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together in an innovative new way to solve problems together, using technology and social media and the BarCamp unconference toolkit to change their relationship. We're very proud to have helped the Toronto Transit Commission to usher in a new era of collaboration with its customers and community stakeholders! For more information, read the article in Harvard Business Review or check out the HBR page on the TransitCamp wiki for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp.

As authors, we want to be clear that while our names may appear in the byline of this article, these ideas and the event itself were created and inspired by a group of local community participants and peers and global thought leaders who both helped and inspired us. We would like to acknowledge those contributions and inspirations here:

Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen

Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood;Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O'Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the $5 philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

Visual Basic macros do not work in Office 2008 for Mac

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 11:32:00 GMT

Apple's move to Intel processors has been a welcome change to the platform and has once again swung their pendulum back in the Innovator direction. The launch of the MacBook Air this week shows off Apple's real strength: whether you love it or hate it, you have to respect the engineering that goes into building a laptop so small and thin that it fits in an envelope. The release of Microsoft's Mac Office 2008, also announced at MacWorld, caught my attention because Office is the last app I run which had not been ported to the Intel chipset.

The existence of Office on the Mac platform has always been a bit of quandary for Microsoft. On the one hand, they sell a lot of copies and make a good chunk of revenue on it. On the other hand, they sell it to people who don't buy Windows (unless they're going to run it in Parallels or Fusion) and are therefore helping to support the existence of a platform which directly competes with two of their primary money makers (Windows and Office for Windows). There was actually a point in history, back in the dark days of 1997, when Microsoft invested $150m in Apple and pledged to continue to develop versions of Office (and InternetExplorer!) for Mac OS — a move which may well have saved Apple's bacon. Fast forward 10 years and we have a new release of Office, so what's changed?

On the surface, this is a great update. Lots of thought has gone into the UI, which resembles a Mac OS native version of the Ribbon seen in Office 2007 for Windows. It's Intel native, which makes it much faster on modern Macs than Office 2004 was (mostly because it's no longer running in the Rosetta emulation layer). What's not to like? Well, there's one thing. It's a small thing when you read it in a long list of changes, but when you actually stop to think about it, it's not such a little footnote.

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS no longer supports Visual Basic for Applications Macros. VBA has been the standard Macro language for Office releases on both Mac OS and Windows for a long, long time and there are probably millions of Office documents out there that have embedded macros. I regularly use two such documents, an Excel spreadsheet which we built internally and which helps us calculate accurate estimates for clients, and a Word document which was provided to me for a project I'm working on and which I have to use to complete my work. Opening our Costing Workbook in Excel gives the following error dialog:

The first time it came up, I didn't read it properly and thought it was the old security warning that Excel used to give when opening a document with macros in it. It was only on the second pass that I realized what I was seeing: we will never be able to use our Costing Workbook again. This is a little more insidious in the project document I have to use, as it opens without a warning but none of the built-in functions and buttons do anything. Clicking on the "Learn more about macros and Office for Mac" shows a Help window with the following contents:

Cause: Office 2008 for Mac cannot run Visual Basic macros or load add-ins that contain Visual Basic macros.
    Solution: Keep the macro in the file.
    Solution: Remove the macro from the file.
    Solution: Save the macro in another macro-enabled file format.
    Solution: Create a new macro by using AppleScript.

The first three are just solutions which allow you to keep the macros from getting destroyed when the file is saved in Office 2008 format. The last one is the real kicker: the only actual solution is to recreate your macros in AppleScript format. Kudos to Microsoft for beefing up AppleScript support for the suite (and it does look pretty thorough), but what they're basically saying is that you can no longer interop with your Windows colleagues and you have to recreate any macros you had in a completely new language. You may find yourself scratching your head at this point, much as I was when I made this discovery. Why would they do such a seemingly stupid thing? Erik Schwiebert ("Schwieb"), a member of the Mac team, explains in an excellent blog post Saying Goodbye to Visual Basic (have I mentioned how much I love Microsoft's approach to corporate blogging? No? It's awesome. Everyone should learn from them). I completely sympathize with Erik's description of their plight and I agree that a two year delay would have been unacceptable, but I also think this decisions has some very serious consequences for Apple's potential in the corporate market.

We basically run Office only because our clients do. If we had our choice, we'd probably run Pages for word processing, we would definitely run Keynote for presentations (and I use it for any of mine already), and would be stumped to replace Excel (Numbers is a nice start but it's a long way from ready). If we felt that there were other applications out there which would flawlessly handle our clients' documents, we'd probably switch today (we've tried NeoOffice and OpenOffice with mixed results — suggest alternatives in the comments). We're a small shop though, and we get to set our own IT direction. Many of our colleagues work in large organizations who have IT departments which have been actively hostile toward Macs until recently and have only just started to come around (if they have at all). A big reason for that change has been Office, since Mac users can work seamlessly with their Windows colleagues (particularly in an Exchange environment using Entourage). If you work in an organization large enough to have an IT department, there's a pretty good chance that your company has also got some complex documents with macros in them (likely in Excel, which sees a lot more scripting than Word). The very rock and hard place described by Erik is about to crush your chances of getting a Mac on your desk, since any new Mac will be Intel-based and any new license of Office will be 2008 and now you'll be back into no-interop land. I'm not the only one who finds this so disheartening: in an opinion piece published in Macworld way back in December 2006 (when Microsoft first announced that they were removing VBA support), Rob Griffiths said:

Microsoft Office isn't among the apps that will run natively on Intel-based Macs, and it won't be until the latter half of 2007, according to media reports. But when it does ship, Office will apparently be missing a feature so vital to cross-platform compatibility that I believe it will be the beginning of the end for the Mac version of the productivity suite.

He also points to a thread on Ars Technica, which includes 3 pages of angry feedback from people who will be seriously affected by this decision. I feel for the Microsoft Mac Business Unit (MacBU) team members who had to make this decision, even though I'm sure that ditching VB's ten year old implementation was a weight off their shoulders. Unfortunately for me, and for many of you, it was really just a transfer of weight onto our shoulders.

So, if you're feeling that weight, MacTech Magazine published their Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript: MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition guide in their April 2007 issue (which is now entirely available online), which I recommend as a fantastic starting point. I agree with their introduction in that there is an advantage for Mac users who take the time to learn AppleScript: it's the scripting language for the whole platform so you can easily build scripts which integrate Office into other apps, and you'll know how to script non-Office things as well. I actually do a fair bit of AppleScripting from time to time and have made some great little scripts (particularly Copy Path, which copies the path to the current Finder window onto the Clipboard), and I encourage Mac users with a programming bent to learn it. I'm just not sure you should be forced to do so in order to keep using your own documents.