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Don’t forget to buy Design, Code, Test, Repeat.  It’s a fun, funny, and helpful read.

Recently, I’ve gotten to the point in my release cycle where I’m almost ready for Beta(!) on my IDE for uCLinux uboot, kernel, and application development, Fusion MMX.  Building it has been a lot of fun and very educational as well.  I’ve been able to find so many useful open-source utilities to make development easier.

Of course, that means that some documentation is in order.  I’ve written plenty of documentation in the past, most recently for GTO, a Java application.  For that product, I chose to use JavaHelp, which wasn’t difficult to learn or use, but it was a rather manual process of taking screen shots, trimming them, labeling them, etc.  I couldn’t find a free (we’re a small company, so we like free) environment for creating this and I didn’t want to have to go through the manual process with all of the menus, dialogs, toolbars, and context menus for Fusion.  I also didn’t want to have to learn the ins and outs of Microsoft’s help compiler environment if I didn’t have to.  I just wanted to write the documentation, if possible, and let someone else take care of the busywork.

While I couldn’t find something free, I did find the next best thing: something that was so good and so inexpensive that it paid for itself – Dr. Explain.  What I found there was an application that was simple to use, handled the details of the help environment, and made documentation incredibly easy.  The one feature that literally paid for itself was the UI capture tool.  Start the tool, then focus on a UI element (window, menu, toolbar, dialog) and click.  Dr. Explain takes a screen shot of the element, then labels the individual items to be documented.  Holy cow, what an easy way to do documentation.  The creation of internal and external hyperlinks made cross-referencing a breeze.

Finally, I can export it to html, chm, or rtf for maximum flexibility.  For my next revision of GTO (the java-based application), I’ll be trying to use Dr. Explain for that documentation, too.  I don’t usually write product reviews, but when I run across something that I like this much, I want to share it with my fellow developers.

My family and I have just returned from a college tour of New England.  It was grueling, fun, informative, and alternately boring and thrilling.  It’s amazing how similar each presentation is and yet you can get a feel from each college.  For those of you unfamiliar with the latest methods of college admissions presentations, they usually consist of a tour and an information session.  The order of which one comes first is random and in some places, up to you.

Tours are conducted by students and they take you to a residence hall (you usually see a dorm room), a dining hall, an academic building or two (you’ll see a classroom), the library, and a few other unique features of each college.  It’s amazing, but somehow you get a “feel” for the place on the tour by seeing the place and the students who go there.  Some places seem friendly and open, some stuffy and exclusive.

The greater variety (within a very unvarietal setting) is the information session.  For the larger schools, they are done with a combination of talking by an admissions officer and some Powerpoint slides.  Some have students do some of the talking about their personal experiences and their impressions.  These tended to be more interesting, informative, and useful in getting to know a place.  At the smaller, more exclusive schools, the presentations tended to be drier (with one notable exception).  At one Ivy League school, the admissions officer went on so long about how students would be challenged by other students and forced out of their comfort zone that it scared the crap out of my daughter.  Unfortunately, this school may lose some qualified applicants because some snooty admissions officer wants to make the place sound more intimidating than it probably is.

The whole thing made me thing that the presentations are completely lacking in creativity and any really good way of presenting a college to prospective students.  More to the blog’s topics, it also made me think about ways that I’ve presented myself and companies present themselves to the public.  There are things that large companies and smart individuals do to cultivate an image.  Mac computers are for free spirited, independent people.  All financial institutions are conservative, sensible, and reliable, and they have your best interests at heart.

Small companies – and software companies are often small – often want to present an image of being large and stable.  Web sites for them will be polished and give the impression of dozens or hundreds of people at your service, even if there are only 1 or 2 people in the whole place.

On a personal level, you have the ability to present an image of yourself at work as well.  Are you hard or easy to contact?  Are you difficult or easy to talk to?  Do you respond to requests quickly or do you sit on them for weeks?  If you work with lots of other people, do you dress like a crumpled pile of laundry or at least look neat?  Do you smile or scowl most of the time?

In addition to the code you write, you have the ability to make impressions that are far more important to your growth or survival in a company.  It all depends on the image you want to present and this is within your control.

I saw a great Toyota commercial on TV a week ago. The gist was: “At Toyota, we have six different SUVs, one that will fit every family or personal lifestyle. Come in a try one on for size – we’re sure you’ll find one that you like.”

I started laughing and thought about the real message and what Toyota really wanted to say: “Look, just two years ago all you gluttonous Americans wanted was a giant gas-guzzling SUV. Even as gas prices were climbing to $3 per gallon, you still wanted them. But, now that we’re pushing $4 a gallon, suddenly you’re having second thoughts? What’s the matter with you people. You don’t care one bit about this stuff do you? Are you really going to let a little thing like money get in the way of your true desires? You’re mortgaged up to your eyeballs, have crippling credit card debt, and probably had to finance most of your last SUV, surely you want to buy another one. Think about driving over monster rocks in your $40,000 Land Cruiser or driving through seven foot high piles of snow in your RAV-4. Just look at this cool video of our SUVs sliding sideways on the sand-covered road we built for this commercial. Or picture yourself drinking beer with your buddies and this group of great looking bathing-suit beauties and hunks in the beach parking lot or maybe right on the beach! Please don’t let Toyota go bankrupt just because you’re fickle. Buy a new Toyota SUV now!”