ModalSoftware Blog

Actionrev Designed Your Way

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 12:27:03 GMT

Actionrev was delivered as a product with a simplified palette of features. This allowed us to focus on delivering a design that was flexible, scalable, and robust enough to handle various business requirements. Through the process we scrapped three or four designs until we settled on what we thought would handle the future of the product.

With the core design in place we sought after early adopters to help us customize the features. As we worked with these users we got great feed back on how the product should work. We were in daily discussions with them producing many great features. Luckily the design we chose was able to elegantly handle the load.

This process gave us an idea of how to market our product. Remaining in the theme of applying simple software to process complex tasks we coined the term “Community Enhancements” and built our business model around it.

The premise is software plus service delivers great business value. We sell our core product, Actionrev, on a simple month-to-month lease. Included in that usage is support which we highly encourage. As we talk to our users we are able to enhance the core design or add features to support their needs. With a quick turnaround, usually on a few days, we release an update that’s immediately available to all users of the software.

This process makes our users very excited to talk to us. Our customers often call us to just talk or brainstorm because they want to be involved with this development process.

With this model as a customer focused software company, ModalSoftware expects to gain an edge over the competition.

Fresh look for Actionrev

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:35:11 GMT

For the new year we rolled out a new look for Actionrev. The biggest goal for the new visual design was to improve clarity and organization of information.

With the new color theme we used warmer colors to bring active information to the forefront and cooler colors to push passive information to the back. Using only a two color theme we used different shades to help organize the screen.

After the roll out of the application we immediately received phone calls from our users who were happy to see the change. That’s a more subtle goal that we aimed for. Most of our early adopters have been using the system for months. Most of the work and improvements have been deep within the product which cannot be “seen”. Delivering a new visual design help convey product “freshness” and the impression their product is actively being worked on.

Feel free to browser the demo yourself:

http://actionrev.com/demo

Zygote was born one year ago

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:18:49 GMT

On December 27, 2006 the first line of source code for Zygote (now called Actionrev) was checked in. From that day the source code has been scrapped, twisted, tested, reworked, redesigned, polished, deployed, and above all used! We are on revision 889 with about 70 users logging in daily.

Our plans for 2008 is to ramp up sales and push Actionrev as much as we can. The segment of the transportation industry that we’re targeting is a very tight community. They work closely together to keep the wheels moving. To help connect these businesses we’re working hard to roll out our next generation of Zygote called the “Actionrev Network”. Through the network we will connect distributors, to dealers, to the service shops to speed up the flow of business.

Actionrev is Online!

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:14:17 GMT

The end of summer here in central California was blazing hot as well as the developers’ code here at Modal Software!

In August we launched our new product, Actionrev, into production with two clients going live. Our team was able to knock out the conversion process with very little disruption to their day to day business.

Even more exciting are the responses our sales team have been receiving from the prospects. The most common requests are for a modern user interface and seamless multi-location support. We’re proud to say our software delivers those best.

A lot of companies out there are still operating on expensive AS/400 servers and paying high maintenance fees. Because we can leverage the internet to deliver our software as a service we can drive the total software costs down. We offer affordable leases based on the number of users your company has.

Surrounding the launch of our application was a lot of busy work. We have been responding to and prioritizing feature requests, talking to lawyers for trademarks and copyrights, and lots of micro meetings to keep our little company of six employees on target. It’s lots of work but we’re looking forward to the big payoff…a profitable software house!

Unused Icons

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:45:47 GMT

While waiting for my flight from New York I noticed a familiar balloon window on the flight schedule. Tyler and I had a quick chuckle about it.

It’s a harmless example of how cumbersome it is to use software that’s tied together in massive bundles. No matter how mainstream it was to be a Windows developer I still found it refreshing to work with Linux and friends simply because of the Unix philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well
Write programs to work together
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface

Serve me software a-la-carte!

Kick the Tires

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:33:15 GMT

ModalSoftware needs your help.

With Zygote out in Pilot Release we need folks to kick the tires and give us feedback. So we’re going to open Zygote for public access with a bounty on bug reports.

The first person to find and report 50 bugs will get a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate from ModalSoftware. That’s $1 per bug! All we need from you in the bug report is your name, email address, phone number, browser type, the date & time when the error occurred, and the URL of the page the error occurred on. Any additional feedback would make a great addition.

The contest is open through Aug, 31 2007. The reward is only open to US residents. ModalSoftware employees are not eligible for the reward. If Kaiser from the large security company in California participates he’ll have to reach 100 bug reports for the certificate.

For access to the Zygote Pilot Release:

http://zygote.modalsoftware.com

Username: guest Password: guest

Send all bug reports to: richard@modalsoftware.com

Zygote Pilot Release!!

Tue, 29 May 2007 23:51:12 GMT

Today was an exciting day for the team at ModalSoftware!

Today we successfully demoed the first Zygote Pilot Release to our selfs. Our small company of six were all present for the demo. SVN revision 253 officially marked Zygote feature complete for our first pilot site. Here’s a few snippets from the SVN log:

it started with:

inital check in
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r1 | rcaetano | 2006-12-27 04:08:41 -0800 (Wed, 27 Dec 2006) | 1 line

a little hesitation with our past hosting company:

i hope the server has version 1.1.6 of rails and this should fix the problem 
we has other day
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r15 | rcaetano | 2007-01-21 05:39:45 -0800 (Sun, 21 Jan 2007) | 1 line

mid way through we scrapped our database design for a new and better design:

added sql file for new database design
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r64 | rcaetano | 2007-03-11 09:52:30 -0700 (Sun, 11 Mar 2007) | 1 line

excitement over figuring out how AJAX works in Rails:

Look at the way i am rendering line item partial
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r73 | vaggarwal | 2007-03-13 15:14:43 -0700 (Tue, 13 Mar 2007) | 1 line

Line items that will blow your socks off
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r124 | tlove | 2007-04-14 06:22:03 -0700 (Sat, 14 Apr 2007) | 1 line

don’t know how we lived without capistrano in the past!:

added capistrano
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r148 | rcaetano | 2007-05-12 17:39:14 -0700 (Sat, 12 May 2007) | 1 line

our first intern check in:

added estimate form validation
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r157 | ecranston | 2007-05-16 02:58:05 -0700 (Wed, 16 May 2007) | 1 line

and finally…lines of code stats…

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 0.80  T=27.0 s (8.3 files/s, 552.6 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Javascript            8       761       266      4876 x   1.48 =        7216.48
Ruby                104       764       393      3153 x   4.20 =       13242.60
Rails HTML          107       343        21      2677 x   1.90 =        5086.30
CSS                   5       133        63      1440 x   1.00 =        1440.00
HTML                  1         3         1        26 x   1.90 =          49.40
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                225      2004       744     12172 x   2.22 =       27034.78
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We love work!

Thu, 24 May 2007 19:04:16 GMT

At ModalSoftware we work hard through having a good time …

Like the time when we booked a trip to New York to work from coffee shops. However, we ended up working mostly from the Apple Store on 5th street!

Even our clients are fun …

While in a meeting discussing how to handle obsolete records in a database the business owner says, “We need to watch that, terminated employee records come back like herpes!”

And not to mention the excitement in our office building …

One morning as I tried to open the office door I noticed something blocking it. I peeked around the door and found a desk. Apparently somebody chucked the desk down the stairs out of fustration and left it!

Designers, Designers, Designers

Mon, 21 May 2007 22:29:55 GMT

It’s a cool morning in Visalia as I enjoy my morning brew. I’m excited to report on the interns’ first week. They all did a great job of fitting in and grabbing a piece of Zygote to work on. I feel very fortunate to have found the talent in time for our push to ship production code by end of summer!

Over the weekend I was thinking about how Modal Software would grow. Modal basically consists of two divisions: Applications and Custom. The Applications division is responsible for marketing and supporting products such as Zygote. The Custom division handles the consulting and custom development projects. Eventually Applications will become the sales and support department while Custom will become the operations department for development. Growing the Custom division will be a careful process.

I have this vision that Custom will be built around small development teams. Each team will be responsible to a customer for a project or a module of a larger project. The team will start with a carefully selected software designer. The designer is responsible for creating a vision of what to deliver. Designers will choose the developers, engineers, graphics designers, and contractors for the team. There is an important distinction between a designer and a manager. Designers write code, test deliverables, pick graphics, choose colors, and make the decisions (sometimes based on the teams’ input) to ship. Designers are not task masters.

I buy into the rule that states as people are added to the design decision making process the integrity of the design is broken down. I believe its best to deliver a cohesive design built on a solid vision with consistent elements and philosophies.

A quote from Donald Norman (author of The Design of Everyday Things):

“You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy…The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.”

At Modal Software our projects may be a tiny fraction of the size of Windows or OS/X but the rule still applies. To deliver the best value to our customers we’ll insure good design by starting with great software designers.

My weekend of thinking about software design ended on the question: How do I find great software designers?

Summer Interns

Fri, 18 May 2007 11:53:12 GMT

Here at Modal we have two full time developers (Tyler and Myself) and a couple of outside contractors. To help grease the process of getting Zygote ready for production we decided to look for some interns who could work onsite and crank on the little things between the cracks.

We got lucky!

This week all three interns started work. Brandt and Eric both come from the local community college. Brandt is taking care of our in-house IT support while Eric, who has experience with HTML and Javascript, is working on getting the Ruby on Rails views ready for production use.

Our third intern Jeff comes to us all the way from Kansas. He’s got past experience with Django and Python. Slipping into Ruby was a pretty low hurdle for him. He’s currently working on the data models to insure things like validation logic are working correctly.

These guys are moving at warp speed. Everyday we walk home with a significant piece of work checked in!

Need I mention the guys are all Mac heads? =)