Nick Bradbury

HomeSite Discontinued

Last night I found out that HomeSite has been discontinued.

I was surprised to hear this, but not because I thought it was premature – truth is, I was surprised HomeSite hadn't been discontinued a long time ago.  It's been almost 15 years since I created HomeSite, and I stopped working on it in 1998 when I left Allaire Corporation.  Several other developers took over after I left, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has touched it for several years, so the fact that it was still being sold until now is a nice testament to how useful people found it.  Kudos to Macromedia and Adobe for keeping it around, despite the fact that it competed with some of their other products.

Sometimes in this blog I've made disparaging remarks about HomeSite, but that's not because I disliked it.  It's just that it's hard to look at something you created so long ago without seeing all the mistakes that you've learned not to make since then.  I'm actually very proud of HomeSite, and very thankful that it enabled me to quit my job and work at home.  And, funny enough, HomeSite is also what paid for the home I'm living in now.

I'm also incredibly thankful to the great community that sprang up around HomeSite and helped make it so popular.  The Wikipedia page on HomeSite captures a bit of this history:

"Nick Bradbury and then Allaire had a policy of having an open support forum for those interested in its products, both current customers and prospects. The fans of HomeSite would contribute to the development of the product by making suggestions on-line and refining those suggestions amongst themselves. The Allaire developers would join in the discussion, participating and really incorporating user suggestions…Users responded to that respect and love for the tool by supporting each other and by creating and sharing a wide variety of HomeSite extensions."

These days it's common practice for programmers to actively involve customers in the creation of their software, but back in 1995 it wasn't the norm.  I certainly wasn't the first developer to take this approach, but I like to think I was one of the pioneers.  That more than anything is what I'm most proud of with HomeSite: in some small way, I hope I helped to break down the invisible wall between developers and users.  So much of our society's future depends on technology that we absolutely must open the lines of communication between those building the tools and those using them.

Anyway, I hope you'll forgive my patting myself on the back a bit here.  I've never had one of my creations go the way of the dodo, so I'm feeling a bit nostalgic at the moment, and I'm looking back and remembering the things (most of them accidental) that got me started down this path I'm on.

Update: I have to add that TopStyle 4.0 is an excellent replacement for HomeSite. It even has the tabbed HTML toolbars that were so popular with HomeSite customers.

If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support

Before I fell into the world of shareware, I worked in the bowels of corporate America developing client-server applications.  And I hated it.

Perhaps the thing I hated the most was that I rarely talked with the people who ended up using my software.  I was given a list of requirements, told what was expected, and that was it.  I never found out whether my work met the needs of those using it, never got to ask them how I could improve it, never knew if my software was a blessing or a burden to them.

Apparently that was smart business, because the companies I worked for charged their clients an obscene amount for my work.  But it was a lousy way to write software.  The whole point of writing software is to create something useful – to create something that, even if in a small way, makes someone’s life better.  And how can you know whether you’re doing that if you don’t talk with the people who use your applications?

I broke out of corporate development by getting lucky with HomeSite, which I never expected to become as successful as it was.  Looking back, it’s clear that its success wasn’t because it was a "killer application," but because I opened the floodgates and directly communicated with my customers.  By talking with customers I helped ensure that it met their needs, which is the best any developer can hope for.

It seems so obvious: if you want to develop software that’s useful to people, you’ve got to talk with them.  But too many developers take the anti-social approach and consider customer support to be beneath their status.  Besides, talking with customers would distract them from important code-slinging.

Look, I can understand that viewpoint, especially if you’re working on something that’s very popular.  You can’t create anything if you spend all your time doing support.  But avoiding support completely is a big mistake. 

If you've never supported your own software, spending just one day doing tech support will be an eye-opening – not to mention humbling - experience.  You'll have to keep your ego in check, because most people who contact tech support do so because they're having problems with your software, some of whom will use colorful language to describe the annoyances they're running into.

But that's the stuff you need to hear.  You need to hear it because you're the one who can solve those annoyances.  You're the one who can get rid of all the things that prevent your software from being that kick-ass program that people recommend to their friends and co-workers.

You also need to hear an unfiltered view of what people want your software to do for them.  If you rely solely on your tech support team to tell you the features that customers want, chances are you'll develop those features without really knowing why people want them.

And that's not meant as a criticism of your tech support team.  When NewsGator was still doing tech support for FeedDemon, they did an excellent job of answering people's questions and forwarding feature requests to me.  But I would still follow-up with customers to figure out exactly why a feature was necessary, and quite often it turned out I didn't really need to add a new feature, but instead needed to change how an existing one worked.  A lot of feature requests were the result of people being annoyed with how an existing feature worked, and they wanted some way to get around it.

If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology.  Don't worry if your resume isn't filled with the latest buzzwords.  Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don't care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication.

Dog Rescue

My daughter has wanted a puppy for as long as I can remember, but I always said "no way."  It’s not that I don’t like dogs; it’s just that we already have two of them (including the asshole), and I couldn’t imagine adding another one to the mix.

Well, last month, after years of playing the role of "evil Dad," I caved.  I finally said that she could have a dog – and there was an immediate rush to visit animal shelters before I changed my mind.

Visiting an animal shelter is always heartbreaking because you wish you could take every dog home with you, but none was more heartbreaking than the last one we visited.  This place was nothing short of inhumane.

Dogs left to sit in their own feces for days, cramped cages designed for one dog holding as many as three, an old, shaggy dog left outside in the heat without shade, etc.  I could say more, but I need to skip the rest of the details because we’re working to get the place cleaned up, and I don’t want to say anything here that could interfere with that process.

On each visit to this hellhole, my wife and I were drawn to a white German Shepherd/Husky mix who shared a dirty cage with her nine-week old female puppy.  These two beautiful dogs were in sharp contrast to the conditions they lived in.  It’s hard to explain, but if you’re a dog lover, then you know what I mean when I say that a dog’s eyes tell you so much about them.  The mother’s eyes radiated intelligence, warmth and courage.

So we decided to get them out of there.

Two days later they were in the back of my car taking a ride into the good life.  After a brief stay at the vet, they came home and were introduced to the two dogs we already own (who we hope have since forgiven us).  And it turns out our initial impression was correct – the mother is a wonderful dog, impressively smart and well-behaved, and also incredibly strong despite being underfed.  She loves to take long walks, runs faster than I can believe, and is a sucker for a double-handed backrub.

Her puppy, of course, has the energy of a cheerleader on crack.  One minute she’s fast asleep; the next, she’s pouncing on her mother’s head just for the fun of it.  The only thing on this planet that has more energy than her is my daughter, who bonded with her immediately.

I had completely forgotten how much work a puppy is, though.  It’s like having a new-born baby: it keeps you awake at all hours of the night, and you just can’t believe something so small could poop so much.  Like babies, if puppies weren’t so cute, then I’m pretty sure that out of sleep-deprived desperation we’d find some way to flush them.  But then they grow up a bit, you get some sleep, and realize they were worth the effort.

PS: We named the mother "Bella," and the puppy was named "Ripley" by our daughter.

Bing Search in FeedDemon

Now that Microsoft’s Bing search engine is live, I figured I’d create a "search definition" for FeedDemon to simplify subscribing to Bing search feeds.  Here's how to use it:

1. View this page in FeedDemon, then click here to install the Bing search definition
2. Click the Subscribe button, then type the keyword you wish to search for and click Next
3. Select "Bing" from the list of search engines and click Next
4. Select the folder you want to place this feed in, then click Next
5. Click Finish

After installing this search definition, you’ll also be able to search Bing directly from FeedDemon’s address bar.  Before you can do this, though, you’ll first need to select Bing as your search provider from the search button at the right of FeedDemon’s address bar, like this:

Note that FeedDemon’s address bar supports all of Bing’s advanced search keywords, including the feed: keyword which enables finding RSS feeds about a specific topic (ex: type feed:fitness to find fitness-related feeds).

Update: FeedDemon's automatic error reporting shows that there's a bug in older versions of FeedDemon which may cause a file access error downloading the above file when not logged into Windows as an admin.  This bug was fixed in FeedDemon 3.0 RC2.