Like a growing number of computer users, 3hv is an Apple Mac based company. Sometimes, this can lead to problems … most people use Microsoft Windows, which looks and works differently.

Never fear - since Apple switched to using Intel processors, companies such as VMWare and Parallels make it possible to run Mac software alongside Windows software. Making cross-platform testing a breeze.

Blackfriars Marketing commenting on Bill Gates’ claim that Enterprise Software gets little respect (via the Wall Street Journal).

As someone who has worked on ‘business’ and ‘enterprise’ software for most of my career (the difference being one of scale as far as I can see) I wholeheartedly agree. I got sick of being told that the user-interface was ‘good enough’. Half a second of frustration quickly adds up if you are sat in front of an application for eight or more hours a day(*).

especially when we confront real systems at work that increase workloads, enforce meaningless restrictions that don’t help customers, and sport user interfaces that feel Kafka-esque in their user hostility. It’s not surprising that enterprise software gets no respect; it is surprising that there aren’t more cases of employees throwing their computers out windows in frustration.

(*) Incidentally, that always used to be my response when people said that Windows had achieved parity with the Mac user experience. Give two experienced users a tight deadline, one on a Mac, the other on Windows, and see who swears the most. Frustration => Unhappiness => Staff Turnover (for the buyer) and No Repeat Sales (for the vendor)

Interesting - a plugin for Rails that uses Flash to push messages to the client (instead of using polling, as Campfire does). I’ve not looked at this at all but I’m sure, if it works, it could be very very useful.

Markaby is great but it sometimes stumbles on helper methods. I’ve mentioned that you need to add a to_s onto urls. One other is it gets the ActionView::Helpers::FormOptionsHelper.select function and the Html select tag confused. Reading through the comments in various places there are various suggestions to resolve this - none of which worked for me.

So I did this in app/helpers/application_helper.rb

  # markaby doesn’t like selects so give it something it does like  def drop_down object, method, choices, options = {}, html_options = {}    select object, method, choices, options, html_options  end

Now, in your view, instead of calling select you call drop_down :object, :method, choices and Markaby is happy. And the name drop_down? Well that’s what most of my users call them so it makes sense to me.

I love the song “Standing Here” by the Stone Roses (you may notice a Roses-bent to this blog). Not only does it have some of John Squire’s finest noodlings, great lyrics and fantastic work by Mani - it also includes one of my favourite bits of backing vocals in the world. A simple “ooh ooh” from Reni. That’s not the clever bit though. In the first verse there is no “ooh ooh”. In the second verse there is one “ooh ooh”. In the third, there are two “ooh ooh”s. I can still remember the first time I noticed it (months after I first heard the song). I pointed it out to my friends and they were all impressed too.

Just a tiny detail.

Hard to spot.

But once you’ve seen it you notice those same, tiny, details in their other songs. That craftsmanship, that attention to detail, is what made them great songwriters (at least till the Second Coming when Squire shoved Geffen’s money up his nose).

In the same vein, I have just spent twenty minutes adding a similar detail to our application. One that most people will never ever notice. But if they do, they will think “that’s nice” and for thirty seconds they will feel good about their choice to shell out cash on us. And the feature? It’s this:

Spotted it yet? How about here?

That’s right - the person object has a gender field and, based upon the gender, it displays the correct possessive - his or her (or their if not known) in the menus. Again, a tiny detail. But they all count.