If you are in the process of setting up your website to accept orders for your software or are interested in reading about using ShareIt for your sales, you’ll want to read Dennis Gurock’s experience of setting up shop for his SmartInspect software.

Will Shipley, the founder of the company responsible for Delicious Library, gave a talk to a group of students about creating successful software. He has posted his slides from the talk that are very funny, full of insight, and show you how you can drive a really cool car. He highlights a lot of reasons to develop for the Mac as opposed to the Windows platform and he even guarantees success if you follow his advice.

Related posts: Coffee Shop Software

submitted by Justin Van Patten

Jeff Sandquist points out that Microsoft has now released the Shareware Starter Kit. The starter kit uses the .Net Framework 2.0 and downloads are available for C#, VB, and C++.

From Dan Fernandez:

The Shareware Starter Kit is a sample application of the common features in all shareware applications. You can easily modify, extend and integrate these into your own applications. The Channel9 guys even have a contest where you can write code to use the Shareware Starter Kit and code your way to a free ticket to the PDC.

A lot has been said recently about Microsoft moving into SMB market but by releasing things like the Shareware Starter Kit shows me that they are committed to developers and partners even more than before.

To follow up the previous post, Nick and Newsgator have decided to not use the subscription model for FeedDemon, as they had previously announced, based on customer feedback.

I’m sure this was a trying week over at Newsgator but we should all be so lucky to have such vocal customers. Coca-Cola would have paid good money for this type of feedback before they introduced New Coke.

Nick Bradbury has announced that NewsGator will be making future versions of FeedDemon subscription based software. As a developer I certainly see the value of a subscription based business model….when it fits. I’m not so sure it fits in this case, especially after reading this sentence from Greg Reinacker’s post regarding the matter.

…we really feel like this was the way to go, given the challenges we were facing selling (emphasis mine) into consumer, business, and enterprise markets all at once.

Decisions have to be made every day when a company is facing a challenge, especially when trying to integrate a newly acquired company but in this case, the decision does not seem very customer-centric. My feelings are that by doing this Newsgator is able to solve their problems and keep investors happy by creating a revenue stream that will be much more predictable. Unfortunately, this is done at the expense of some customers by moving the focus off of the actual use of the software to the tool itself when in fact it should remain transparent. As developers, no matter how much we would like it to be about the software, it simply isn’t.