texinick's dashboard

Hi Justin,

Yes, I have youtube & Picasa configured.

N

I've recently installed Flock 2.0.3, added my gMail account, and I can confirm I'm getting the same problem. Currently I'm showing checked 13916 minutes ago (Running on Mac OSX 10.5.6).

As I said in my long reply above, I will happily work with developers in identifying & resolving bugs and issues... I was one of those that raised issues and filed bugs with LittleSnapper!! :^)

I'd love to help out on the EventBox team, but I still refuse to pay money for beta testing software. The way I see it is helping beta test software and identifying bugs is doing the company a favour, without beta testers, the product development cycle is a lot longer.

I've said enough in my earlier post. I'm not going to say it all again. If that's what these guys want to do, so be it. It must be working for them. – texinick, on December 15, 2008 21:30

haha.. yeah took me ages too!! :^) See the lengths I'll go to!! Imagine all that time put back into testing EventBox. Oh wait... I can't!! My 'trial' expired. hahaha

In my 20+ years of IT, I've seen many different methods of getting software out to people. This isn't the first time I've seen companies request payment in advance, but it's certainly a rare way to operate.

The developer does whatever they need to do. It's their decision. It's their 'baby'.

The more common method is free during beta, and then switching to a paid model, usually, with a discount for the beta testers. I believe this works better for the developer for a number of reasons.

I believe that if the developer wants maximum, quality feedback, then they need as many people as possible to use, fault find, report bugs, etc etc. Having a paid-beta, IMHO, is reducing the amount of people willing to hammer and test the program, and therefore increasing the time to get it to a releasable state. It also makes it hard for people to really test it.

I downloaded EventBox a couple of weeks ago for a quick look. I didn't use it for long, I was busy with a couple of projects, so I deleted it off my machine. Tonight, I thought I'd give it another try. At about 10.30pm, I downloaded and started it up. I started to get a little interested in the program, but when I quit and restarted it (it was now after midnight) the program refused to open saying it was out of it's trial period.

Now I'm not going to spend the money to register it after an hour and a bit of testing it to see if it works the way I hoped it would. But because of the methods for beta release chosen by the developer, it means that they have now lost any feedback that I could have provided. (I have a reasonable track record for helping developers work through bugs and with problem resolution).

I'm not trying to offend anyone, I'm simply trying to explain that by choosing this method, you could be missing out on valuable resources. I'm prepared to put in time with a developer, through the beta period, in order to resolve issues, and in return, I feel the developer needs to respect and consider that the beta-tester is doing them a favour too. I refuse to pay the developer to use a beta program AND THEN give up my already very limited free time to help them through the beta stages. It's give AND take, it works both ways.

Maybe, an alternate method would have been to release the product in a very limited beta.. invite only maybe? But what's done is done.

I've worked through some niggling issues in programs with a couple of developers in the last 12-18 months, and in both issues, they gave me a free licence for their program as a thank you. This was not something I expected, and it's not something I'm angling for here. What it did do was make me a very keen spokesperson for them, and their product, and I will mention and recommend that product whenever is appropriate.

A lot of respect for a company comes from their early actions and decisions. Alienate people too early, and it may hurt later.

Like I said, I'm not trying to offend.. I haven't come in ranting about charging in beta, instead I'm trying to offer some thoughts from other angles.

Regards
Nick

In addition, I'd like to see Plurk & Kwippy included. Also, the ability to see my GTalk contacts' status updates. With GTalk releasing Video Chat via the GMail window, just about every one of my contacts from all previous networks are now hooking up with GTalk. More integration here would be superb!

Maybe one way of interacting with the multiple networks is to incorporate Ping.fm's ability to send to many, many networks. Why reinvent the wheel?

I'm sorry.. I only really started developing for J1.5, and haven't looked into J1.0. If I get a bit of time, I'll see whether it's possible to make it work under 1.0.

Hi Sean,

I've just made the initial release of JoomPing available for download from my site (www.nicktexidor.com) via the Joomla Extensions page.

I'm still getting around coding for Joomla, this is my first component, but it seems to work ok for me.

Hopefully this'll add a couple more potential users to your system.

Regards
Nick

Hey Sean, I think the first attempt at a Joomla 1.5 component is pretty much ready. It works anyway :) Just have to get a few people to try it and see what feedback I get. It's pretty simple really.. receives pings, puts them in database, displays on a page! If you get a moment, visit www.nicktexidor.com and click on the 'What Am I Doing" link. This page has two uses. It is the page that I add into Custom URL, as well as displaying the pings. The module on the left is part of the same 'package' and can be set to display any number of pings.

I'll get them tidied up and uploaded to the joomla extension directory. I also need to do a bit more testing as I noticed Ping's stopped coming through for a while this evening. Removing the Custom URL and re-adding it fixed the problem.

Thanks
Nick

I'm sure someone else will respond if my information is incorrect...

The Custom URL option just posts data to a page on your site. I'm pretty certain, if you have a plain HTML site, there's not much you can do with that data. However, if you know a bit of PHP (or similar), it would be pretty easy.

For example, in php, you'd need to code the page that receives the 'pings' to do something, such as write to a file, or a database, with the $_POST['method'], $_POST['title'] and $_POST['message'] variables. What you do with those variables is pretty much up to you. You can then display the data from the file, or database, wherever you like.

Not sure if that helps any, and being only new to Ping.fm, I'm sure others will correct me if I've led you astray.

N

Thanks Sean. I'll post when the component/modules are done. I'm just testing now.

What you're suggesting is pretty much what I did (see "Follow Me On" on http://www.nicktexidor.com) as a Joomla plugin. Your suggestion would be easy to set up as a simple web page that spits out some html code, but integrating it with ping.fm is a good idea as they already have all your username details, and it could spit all the relevant code straight out for you.

Whaddya reckon ping guys? (Ping guys? maybe we should call them Pinguins!)

If you need any additional help, I'm happy to put my hand up! :^)

I'm new to the community, so please excuse me if this is against the rules here.. I'm guessing you mean something a bit like the "Stalk Me" icons Ping have on their dashboard page?

I got a little inspired by that panel and created a Joomle Module that does a similar thing. You can put your username in for each service you use, and the icon appears in the module. I have this on my site, so people can easily find me on the services I use. I've been working on a few other modules/components to integrate Ping into a Joomla environment.

If you have a Joomla site, then contact me for the module, it's free & you're welcome to use it.

I apologise profusely if I am out of order with my reply.. I don't mean any disrespect here, I'm just trying to promote Ping by incorporating it into the Joomla world. I hope the Ping guys don't mind!!