Tweedle is an iPhone twitter application we wrote because we wanted to have fun.
We made it contain the awesome and released it in the Appstore and it is now available for download.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=327455645&mt=8&s=143441
Working with tech people is very hard for the non techie. Techies,especially those with only a little bit of knowledge, tend to make their opinion almost like gospel. So who is the non techie to trust since he doesn’t know, and has a handful of people telling him completely different things? The trend that I have discovered seem to be that they only trust the person with the closest proximity to them. The guy that they see every day and preaches his gospel every chance he gets. Now I’m not saying that this opinion should be completely discredited nor ignored but taken into account. But when you have a consultant that has more experience and knowledge of the matter telling you something different, you may wish to take the consultants opinion into account. Even pull him aside to ask him one on one.
I am a consultant, and I have a team of four other very high level programmers. Often we are the ones with the most technical expertise in the room. We may seem like a gang when you have 2-5 people telling you the same thing and its not the thing that the guy next to you is saying. If this is the case, you may wish to re-evaluate some things. Our goal is to provide you with the tools and technical knowledge that you need that benefits you financially far over our retainer. If you do not listen to what we have to say and pass it off as nonsense because the guy you see every day says so, you are only digging your own grave. Whenever this happens, the blame comes to the consultant down the road when things go awry.
To sum up, you hire a consultant because they have a specialty of somebody that you are unable to hire in-house, so please, listen to what they have to say. And when their word is questioned, do not call a meeting with the naysayer there, talk to the consultant one on one. Most of them will tell you quite frankly what the issues are.
Recently I have been obsessed with the idea of web applications as actual applications. I hate the term “in the cloud” but it really does define what the current state of affairs is. It is now very possible to not be tied down to one or two machines but use your machine as a dumb terminal (well for most people). Typically most people on a daily basis do only a few things on their computer: read email, update and check address book, update and check calendar, write and read documents and spreadsheets, and read their news feeds. Then there are those of us who indulge in IM and services like facebook and twitter.
All of these can be accomplished via the web quite well.
Google provides free services for most of the major things. Google docs is amazing and I now no longer use a microsoft office program to read and write documents and spreadsheets. it all goes into my google docs. it makes sharing of documents quite easy. Especially when there is a document that is a living document and is updated by multiple people.
Google also has a great news reader, better than any program you will find, gmail is pretty awsome, google calendar is great, and you can easilly sync your address book into google and everything ties in together.
Since i started going down this path, I had a major issue: I have too many browser windows open. My solution is to use SSB’s (site specific browsers). For my mac I found this great program Fluid that does a great job of it.
So saying this, my mandate with creating software is to try to create web applications that are just that, totally encased applications. The days of hiring a person to write you a couple of scripts is over (at least for your sake it is over).
My these are hard economic times when nobody is buying things, its hard to maintain a business where your sole purpose is providing services and products to people.
With profit margins decreasing, since i am a programmer, I have noticed that a lot of peoples initial response is to cut out this expense or even worse, cut it down. Maybe it is me being selfish, but without programing, your sites will stagnate and stay where they are. Without some major changes, I do not believe that anybody will get out of this funk. Continue innovating, making new features, new reports, keep your programmer happy and he/she will make you happy.
Also I have noticed a rash of people hiring jr. programmers in place of their current sr. programmer. Where its great that there are jr. programmers out there looking for a job and willing to learn and burn the midnight oil, please please please, realize that their salary may be half of the sr. programmer, but you will get continually less than half the output from them.
Anyhow 0×7a69 offers some great flat fee retainer programming services where it will really help your bottom line and you will be better off than hiring a team of jr. programmers 
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Hi this is the new programing for the company 0×7a69 which offers extremely agile programming providing the service of long term programming to companies.
I hope with this blog to provide some transparency into the world of programing and how myself and my team see things (as we usually have a different insight than a marketing person)