In only 5 month’s, Peldi Guilizzoni has sold $100,000 in licenses for his Balsamiq Mockups app.

Believe it or not, the simple TODO.txt ticks a lot of boxes when it comes to collaborative issue management. Check out this list of cool features for the mighty TODO.txt file.

I have a fascination with conceptually simple, visually attractive software. Those two characteristics often make software truly excellent IMHO.

James Kovac seems to have a gift for explaining stuff. I though his Loosen Up article on MSDN was brilliant.

I’ve been playing with Git on a jungledisk drive recently (which uses Amazon S3 behind the scenes).

I’ve been playing with the Git this week.

Trying it locally is all very well, but I now want to try it from various locations and computers. I guess I need a central repository…

This is the friendliest console-based-installer I’ve ever used:

Ohlo looks like a cool site for seeing what technologies people are using in their projects.

Cool use of Google maps for selecting where you live or work during site registration.

Have you ever come across those tools that let you generate code from state machine diagrams or state tables? Just for fun, I thought I’d try turning that idea on it’s head:

I can’t seem to get State Machines off my brain this week, sad isn’t it?

I find that I use them so rarely, yet I have a nagging feeling they could be so incredibly useful. I think it’s ultimately because they could let me separate concerns.

I'm finally getting time to dig into C# in Depth and try some stuff out. It's pleasing to see some of the terse constructs we now have.As a small example, this is great:

I had a look around for an instant messaging client for coders, but couldn’t find one.

Features I want for starters are:

When I walk around customer offices, I see that they have rules for cleaning stuff up:

I started playing around with some ideas for a simple implementation of the State pattern. I wanted something that would allow business entities to exist in various states, and have different validations and business logic in different states.

I’ve been looking at the state pattern today, with the goal of allowing business entities to behave differently depending on their state. So, an Order in “Shipped” state would have a completely different behavior to an order in “Placed” state; I might not be able to update an order in Shipped state, but I could if it were merely “Placed”.

Here’s a persistence idiom I don’t like:

Only save entities if and when they are valid. Invalid entities don’t get saved.

I was thinking about the Single Responsibility Principle - which roughly states that a class should only be responsible for one thing. (Is the word responsibility deliberately vague do you think!?)

That’s a cool statement seen is this post from Carsonified.

Today I found a cool feature in NUnit 2.5 Alpha 2 that I’ve been REALLY wanting. Basically, I wanted to be able to run tests multiple times, but with different data each time. This is now possible using the DataSource attribute.

…compared to Vista!

I’ve been using Vista for 6 months now, but I recently installed XP on a testing computer when I didn’t have my Vista disks to hand. I’m now sold on XP, it just feels so much more comfortable and productive compared to Vista. So, back to XP I go…

I’ve been recently getting my head into a new GUI framework recently - ExtJS to be precise. After a few days of stumbling about, I’m now removing reams of code that I wrote at the beginning of my learning curve. This code is being replaced by far less code, but code that makes more use of the framework features.

I’m at it again. I can’t help myself. Ever since my first job working as a lowly student Oracle SQL monkey for engage Mutual Assurance, I’ve wanted to build better SQL tools.

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of creating a GUI design pattern guide for a while, the general idea being that you keep a catalog of controls/techniques for GUI building, and document which situations those controls work best in.

Grrr. I currently have a client who wants to set up a web site for their single software product, with the following features:

Some good friends of mine, Peter and, Susan have set off on their adventures around the world. Pete decided to set up a blog to document their travels - aroundaboutway.com

I absolutely love how 37Signals blog about how they built a particular feature. They give a real walk-through of the thought processes that were involved. The most recent example is the project switcher for base camp. This is a simple feature in essense, but it got a lot of love.

I was quite surprised to see that I haven’t restarted the iMac running OSX Leopard for almost 18 days.

I recently switched to Mac, and it’s been annoying me that I have to switch into Windows (using VMWare Fusion) to get at Outlook for my Contacts and Calendar.

Thanks to this guy I’ve been able to get ASP.NET MVC CTP2 running on OSX and Mono. I’ve been looking forward to playing with ASP.NET MVC, and I’m pretty excited to be able to get it working on Mono.