Mac and Linux

Well, the question is: Given that we are 5 young programmers, without any attachments to any big company, what got into our minds when we decided to use Microsoft’s proprietary technology to develop our software, and restrict ourselves to run only under Windows instead of choosing to write a multi platform software?
I think we must be clear on that we love Linux (Mac is a bit too queer for us, but we must admit it works) and we would love our software could run on every O.S. The thing is some situations made us take a complicated decision. We are only 5 guys, we are not a whole big company. We needed a quick way to put out a product, to show our idea, to try out the concept. The truth is, programming using Visual Studio and the rest of Microsoft’s solutions, saves a lot of time. It has big costs too: the program runs a bit slower, it is not portable to Mac or Linux, the installation of .Net is sometimes a pain, etc. But besides the advantage of programming faster, we found out that Microsoft was willing to give us the licences for the development suite completely free. Considering also that Windows continues to be the most used operative system, we finally decided that, at least for a start, we would develop using .Net.
However, there’s a happier side, we also have a web application which is obviously platform agnostic, and to which I invite everybody: GO!
I hope you share our point!

Bueno, la pregunta es.. si somos 5 jóvenes que nos sentamos a programar en el año 2008, por qué $!&%?#& se nos ocurrió programar usando la tecnología Microsoft (C#, WPF, .Net) restringido a correr en Windows en lugar de hacer un hermoso software multiplataforma en python o c++?
Creo que es importante aclarar que nos gusta Linux (a Mac lo encontramos un poquito fleto, pero igual hay que reconocer que funciona), y nos encantaría que nuestro software pudiera correr en todos los S.O. Pero hay que entender que las situaciones nos obligaron a tomar una decisión complicada. Somos solo 5 tipos, no somos una gran empresa. Necesitábamos una forma rápida de sacar algo a la luz, de mostrar nuestra idea, de probar el concepto. La verdad es que programar en la plataforma de desarrollo de Microsoft, con Visual Studio y todo el cuento, es una manera bastante rápida de desarrollar aplicaciones que hacen lo que uno quiere que hagan, requiriendo un tiempo de programación relativamente reducido. Los costos que tiene son conocidos: el programa corre algo más lento, no es portable a Mac o Linux, la instalación del .Net a veces es una tortura, etc. Además de la ventaja de rapidez de programación, nos encontramos con que Microsoft estaba dispuesto a regalarnos las licencias de los programas que necesitabamos para programar. Considerando además que Windows es todavía el sistema operativo más utilizado por lejos… nos tiramos a desarrollar en .Net. Sin embargo, comenzamos al mismo tiempo un desarrollo web, que sí que es multi-plataforma, y al que invito a probar a todos los que no puedan o no quieran instalar el player: Dale!
Espero que nos entiendas!

Some problems with our site.

As some might have noticed our site was down in several moments during the weekend. On Friday we where surprised to see the site had been hacked (we make a formal call to the hacker(s) to please contact us and tell us how he did it, so we can improve our security!) Now we are checking what happened and trying to improve the server’s security.

Como muchos deben haber notado, nuestra página estuvo caída en diversos momentos del fin de semana. El viernes nos llevamos la sorpresa de que habíamos sido hackeados (desde ya, hacemos una llamada al hacker a que se nos acerque y nos cuente cómo lo hizo, para mejorar nuestra seguridad frente a otra gente más inescrupulosa). Ahora estamos revisando, tratando de mejorar la seguridad del servidor.

Public alpha version available!

For the first time in the short life of Voxound (little more than 1 year), today, we have released a public alpha version of the player together with the public beta of the web version. You can go now and download your copy and give it a try.  The program runs ok, a lot better than many released versions of other programs out there, but we are still fixing a lot of bugs.  Go on, help us a bit and talk about Voxound with everyone you know!

Por primera vez en la corta vida de Voxound (poco más de un año), hoy, hemos liberado la versión alfa pública del player, junto con la versión beta del explorador web. Puedes ir ahora mismo a bajar tu copia y probarla. El programa corre bien, incluso mejor que muchas versiones finales de otros programas, pero todavía seguimos arreglando un montón de bugs. Dale, ayúdanos un poco y habla de Voxound con la gente que conoces.

Where to find romantic music?

Voxound’s main goal: to give people an easy way to find the music they want, using the words they actually use (like romantic, energetic, for running). Before, people visited a record store and asked the clerk.  But now there are almost no physical record stores…

There are several questions on Yahoo Answers and other forums that say “Where can I find italian romantic ballads?”, or “Spanish music you can dance to”, or “french hip-hop”, etc. Even now, in almost 2010, this knowledge continues to reside only on people’s minds. We are working to give people a tool to classify the world’s music in terms that everyone can understand and use. We think one shouldn’t need to know the name of an artist in order to reach his music! That’s what Voxound is all about, song description made by the final user.

Cartoon from www.toothpastefordinner.com

Couchsurfing

We came out 2nd on the Intel Challenge for Latin America, and that means we won US$15.000 and two tickets to Berkeley, California to represent Chile on a worldwide technological business competition. We have not received a penny yet, but are currently at San Francisco thanks to the competition! We decided we wanted to really mix with the local people… we went to couchsurfing.com and found a group of girls who will gadly host us.. in fact, I’m currently sitting at these girls kitchen with Jaime and Ignacio!.

The competition was great. Even though we did not win, we learned a lot and made loads of contacts (I’m thinking about building my own  business card collection now) I guess the most weird contact we did was with some Japanese guy called Sho. He’s building a system called “Hopeful Monster“, to organize single matching parties. And also wrote a book. We got to talk for quite a long time in fact, and even took a picture with him, in the same “onda” of the cover of his book.

Bootstrapping

When I was a kid I once saw a movie called “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen”  and I was shocked by the scene where the amazing Baron (in the picture) pulled his hair to get out of a swamp that was about to swallow him. I soon learned that, at least while respecting the law of physics, it was not that simple to save one’s ass.  But it turns out that in business, it is a possible way to do things, and a nice one too. It is called “bootstrapping”.

I happen to be a fan of bootstrapping lately, as it is a way to develop an evolutionary model on your business. Evolution is the natural way to develop and grow. I’ve learned that pushing growth beyond natural limits usually turns out to be a mess!

Why desktop?

When I worked for a consulting firm, a couple of years ago, I was in charge of helping a non-profit choose an ERP provider. I was really convinced then (and I still am) that the ERP to implement ought to be web based. I fought for it to be so, and struggled to convince everybody it would be better to set “web based” as the primary requisite. There were too many providers that tried to sell us applications with specific system requirements, trying to convince us that the interface would be better, that web apps had laggy interfaces and so on. They were right in a way, at least current web technologies, such as Ajax, even with the most notable programming effort, can’t get as responsive  as an application. Gmail’s interface is not as responsive as Outlooks, but Gmail is better anyway. This is because there are some things that just must be on the cloud. I need to access my email from anywhere. In the ERP case, this non-profit had a huge rotation of their personnel, each of which brought in their own laptops..so they would have had to go on installing the ERP to many different hardware forever, and that would have obviously caused thousands of problems. They could tolerate the laggy interface, just as I tolerate Gmail’s laggy interface, just because the benefit of having it over the web (not having to install, platform independent, etc) were stronger.

We have built a downloadable player because we think some users will enjoy it and will be willing to tag songs with it. We don’t expect big masses of people using our player (even though the alpha version has already been downloaded many times). Where we do expect some more visits, is over the easy to use VoxoundWeb, that will offer a new way for searching music. Under this lens, one could say our player is nothing more than a tool to construct quality user generated content.

Word of mouth

It’s definitely not easy to have people talking about a desktop application. These kind of apps are for sure still very useful, and allow better user interfaces, but in these times everyone is running around the Internet, no time to stop and install something. Besides, Mac fans appear to be the most “talkative” folks around. If your app, like ours, can’t be run on a Mac.. they won’t say a word about it (except for a “When are you releasing a Mac version?” on your feedback forum). The truth is we would love to have a Mac version right now, but we can’t. We have one thousand things to do before we can even think about it.

The solution we found, though, is kind’a obvious. We built a web version to show the concept. You click on a couple of tags, say “french” and “jazz” with a “female voice” and we make a playlist of YouTube videos with the songs that match. Simple! The downloadable player will still be the place where people tag their own songs and organize their collection, but we use the information generated there to organize the music around the web version. We’ve been testing the web version here and it works great.. but it still has a couple of details we must fix before we release it.

Tag2Find

We are not the only ones who think tagging has “something”. These guys have developed an application that lets you add tags to any file on Windows XP. I personally use Windows 7, (thanks to BizSpark), whose built in search works pretty well, so I can’t see much utility on this app, at least for me. Nevertheless  their proposal is interesting, perhaps collaboration is the missing detail. I was shocked to read on their blog that they have had more legal trouble open sourcing their code than if they would have not released their code.. I really don’t get why. Found this over MakeUseOf

Ali-G goes on pitching to investors

A great investor listens to anybody’s idea.

(Check out when Ali shows the skateboard in the end…disturbing silence, isn’t it?)