Web Worker Daily |
| FairSoftware: Instant Software Companies Posted: 30 Sep 2008 01:00 PM CDT
After you set up an account with FairSoftware, you can create as many projects as you like. Each project has participants, and you assign shares to them to indicate their share of the profits. There are mechanisms for share vesting and voting on proposals, as well as payroll and sales tracking - the idea is that you form your team, you build your product, and you sell it via FairSoftware: you can have a purchase button on your own site, but all sales must go through FairSoftware, who take a cut (9.9%) of each sale to cover their expenses and profits. There are certainly attractive points to this proposition, especially if you want to only build software instead of building a company at the same time. Having someone else handle the details of sales, credit cards, tax reporting, and splitting the money can free you to focus on your core skills of design and development. The whole structure is governed by the Software Bill of Rights, a legal contract that you enter into with the other project participants. This is where things get a bit iffy for me: this is 3700 words of legalese which, like any other legal agreement, I would urge you to get professional advice on before signing. One thing to note is that the agreement is explicitly opposed to open source projects. Another is that there is a mechanism for throwing people out, which might give some pause (though it’s always a good idea to be explicit about how a contract can be ended). On the plus side, the contract is also explicit about how a project can get out to another legal entity entirely. All in all, I like the idea of outsourcing some of the e-commerce and tracking functions for a small startup, particularly one that’s just throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks. But I’m less sanguine about the prospect of using a one-size-fits-all contract to manage these functions.    |
| FlexCal for Mac Adds Events to iCal Easily Posted: 30 Sep 2008 10:00 AM CDT
Once Google added synchronization support for iCal back in July, I did integrate the basic scheduler into my web work, but I always found it cumbersome to add events quickly. For a while, I actually found it easier to just create events in my Google Calendar since I already had my browser open. Then I stumbled onto FlexCal, a freeware utility that’s not glitzy, but does the trick. Essentially, FlexCal appears on your Mac in the System Preferences as a preference pane. From here you configure a few items in the utility and then you forget it’s running; Until you need to add an event to your iCal, that is. To use it, you simply press a pre-configured hotkey of your choice and up pops a window to create a new event or task to your calendar. It’s that easy. I use “cmd e” for my hotkey: “e” being for event. Tapping that allows me to enter the event name, choose the calendar I want the event assigned to, start / end time, location and an alarm if I so choose. After the information is entered, a quick hit of the Return key on the keyboard sends the info to iCal, and in my case, to my Google Calendar as well. You can also use FlexCal to add tasks to iCal, however I’m still a Remember The Milk fan. I’d never say that iCal is an end-all, be-all calendar solution, but with free add-ons like FlexCal, it’s getting better.    |
| Two Free Tools for Optimizing Windows Vista Posted: 29 Sep 2008 06:00 PM CDT While users and non-users alike do a fair amount of grumbling about Windows Vista, many of us use it. Those of us who do have also typically learned that customizing Vista is essential for everything from how the interface behaves to improving battery life on portable computers. In this post, I’ll cover a couple of free ways to exhaustively optimize Vista. Tweakguides offers a couple of really exhaustive guides to optimizing both Vista and Windows XP. Dubbed Tweaking Companions, even if you’re already familiar with these guides, the Vista Tweaking Companion has been steadily updated since I last mentioned it and is worth getting in its new version. There is also now a paid Deluxe Edition, which I haven’t yet tried, but the free version is very good. The Vista Tweaking Companion walks you through categorized ways to optimize Vista. The tips include optimizing drivers, adding useful freeware to Vista, shutting down unnecessary features, and more. In particular, Vista is a resource hog, and especially if you are using it on a portable computer with limited resources, getting rid of components you don’t need and use can give you much better performance and fewer headaches. For a free software utility that allows you to choose Vista optimizations you want, look into Vista4Experts. Don’t let the name fool you. This is a very easy utility that lets you shut off parts of Vista that you don’t need and may be bogging you down, and more. You can use it to get rid of many of the more annoying scans and notifications that Vista does by default.    |
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