Through four major product releases, I’ve been a remote member of a team that slowly nudged the product’s code up the scalable, enterprise-ready evolutionary ladder: from single-threaded to multi-threaded, from Access to Sql Server, and from being a stand-alone product to being a component integrated within other, larger Citrix offerings, which is how a product that is used by many is known by name to so few.

The amount of work varied from quarter to quarter but averaged 20-30 hours a week. For all these years, my Citrix hours have been the big rock that had to fit first into every day and that any other work had to fit around.  My Citrix contract has been ‘the day job,’ funding and enabling all the investment in our app product portfolio.

But as of Friday, May 31st, my last work order expired, I emailed my goodbyes, and I turned out the lights on all my remote connections to Citrix machines real and virtual.  I may need to go back to consulting to make ends meet, but not right away, and definitely not for a few months.  I’ve promised myself at least one full-time Summer of Product.  And, tempered with an appropriate amount of trepidation, I am really, really looking forward to the experience.

Citrix could not have picked a better time, from my perspective, to rationalize the resources being applied to PVS.  I frankly don’t know if I would have had the courage to jump ship right this minute but I am extremely grateful for the push.

I have a small but remarkable collection of people working with me, an existing set of products whose potential we are only starting to understand, some new product just coming out the door that I believe has real promise, and some new ideas for other, more ambitious products that we may work on in the near future.

The trick for me is, without my Citrix work to anchor my days, finding a way to avoid the entrepreneur’s version of whirling disease– spinning in place all day trying to get started on one good idea after another and never making tangible progress on anything.

So the time also seems right to try a version of the Zig Ziglar / Seth Godin Pick Four  goal setting program.  I bought one of the set-of-four workbook packs when Godin first brought them out, two summers ago, but only got as far as making my dreamlist and reviewing/updating it from time to time.  I never bothered to go through the actual goal setting exercise because I never saw a good time to kick off the four month recommended interval.  Now’s perfect.  I’m in more control of my own daily agenda than I have been in years and I’ve got the resources available to take the four months from June 1 to October 1 and see what I can do with them.

I’ve set five goals (Godin says to pick four.  Ziglar’s original program recommended picking six.). Three are purely personal, not professional, so I’ll note them here but expect to leave them largely off-screen for the duration.

The two that I plan to be writing about from time to time and sharing my progress reports are:

• Maximize distribution of the ERG2012QL ebook and its Spanish- and French-language siblings.   Use that exercise to increase my understanding of:
  • The current adoption rate of ebooks among North American ‘first responders’ — which in my view includes firefighters and EMTs, of course, but also truck drivers.  Are ebooks a reasonable, platform-independent way to deliver functionality to this market or is this market, which is increasingly using mobile devices, reachable only via platform-specific apps?
  • (Maybe) Identify one or more non-ebook market opportunities.  Yes, I am trolling for a Software-as-a-service (SAAS) subscription product idea.
  • The current state of the art in producing and marketing reference ebooks — which are technically quite a bit more challenging to produce than, say, novels.
• Establish a writing habit and my own (internal and external) identity as a writer (aka blogger).  I do believe that writing can be both an effective research tool and a valuable marketing channel if done consistently and well.  It also appears, for me, on the path to a few different items on my dream list.

The personal three are all pretty predictable for a woman of my age and circumstances. I’m planning on taking a walking tour vacation in Spain with my husband and a couple of close friends in the middle of September. I probably work too many hours and need to get back to having a bit more of a life.  Without any of specifics, they are:

• Get more fit.
• Practice my ‘hearing Spanish’ — that is, understanding spoken, not written, Spanish.
• Work on connecting more with family and friends.

My biggest concern at this point is that I don’t think I’ve done a great job of setting specific, measurable targets for my professional goals.  And, frankly, it’s my one complaint about the Pick Four workbook: not nearly enough guidance on how ambitious or specific to be on the goals themselves.

I did do my homework and read the recommended scholarly paper:  Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey . It’s fairly dense and full of psych-speak but here’s what I got out of it that I think is useful to me:

• In general, learning-oriented goals seem to work better than performance-oriented goals.  The example in the paper was that it was more effective to challenge log-truck drivers to figure out for themselves how to increase their load weights to be consistently just within the legal limit than it was to tell them to increase their average load weight to xxx pounds.  I like this approach. Whatever my job title, it seems to me that I’ve always learned for a living so I think that setting learning goals should work for me.
• Ambitious goals work better than easy goals, but only if you get (or give yourself) partial credit for incremental progress.  High stakes, all-or-nothing goals can be remarkably dis-incenting, especially as the period for accomplishing them wears on, if progress is slow and it looks as if you are not going to make your target.  I did pretty well in college getting by on partial credit, so this makes sense to me.  My current situation IS high stakes — I really want to get enough product revenue coming in that I don’t have to go back to long-term consulting myself — but there is a lot of wiggle room for partial triumphs and occasional small consulting gigs.

I honestly think my work life is too complicated and my situation too fluid to try to set myself a rigid goal like Nathan Barry’s 1000 words a day. As a manager, I owe a lot of my workday to the folks who work with me and to what we are trying to accomplish together.  But I know that the writing goal as stated above is way too vague to be actionable.  So one of my interim goals, for the month of June, say, is to settle on a more concrete, ambitious, but achievable expressions of my goals. Maybe something like: one decent-sized blog post, written primarily by me, each week.

I’m already 13 days into June.  Here’s #1.

Bah.

In this discussion, I’m much closer to the view of Jody Greenstone Miller.  Miller is the author of a recent Wall Street Journal piece:  The Real Women’s Issue: Time — Never mind ‘leaning in.’ To get more working women into senior roles, companies need to rethink the clock.  She correctly, in my opinion, points out that many great women don’t lack the skills or aggression to advance in large corporations.  They ‘stall out’ or bail out, rather than “‘lean in’ because they don’t like the world they’re being asked to lean into.”

Amen — but . . .

But even Miller is missing the boat somewhat when she frames this discussion as primarily a gender issue.  Women working for large corporations may have lead the charge on big-corporate work values for a few decades but they are hardly alone any more.  That movement has become much deeper and more pervasive.

Why isn’t anyone talking about the fact that the same ‘problems’ that have impeded women in some workplaces for the last few decades are exactly the same ‘challenges’ that Gen-X and Gen-Y employees of both genders are presenting to employers?  

Women may have been the most noticeable class of workers to demand the right to a life outside their corporate identities in years past but it’s hardly a gender-specific demand any more.  Today’s workers, female AND male, younger AND older, know and feel free to express that it is truly just not worth it to sell your soul to the company store.  Jobs don’t last.  Heck, companies don’t even last.  Loyalty to a specific employer HAS to be tempered these days with a realistic eye on fall-back plans and other opportunities that might come up.  But this change isn’t just about job security or the lack of it, this change is about values and motivation.

Employers, all employers, but especially those large, hard-charging corporations that Ms Sandberg thinks more women should be leaning into, need to recognize the fact that the employment they offer is now pervasively seen as “the day job” — the gig you do to make possible whatever is REALLY important to you.  Isn’t that the easiest way to reconcile the traits that HR folks tell us Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers and, oh, by the way, older workers now, too, have in common?:  an independence that is often interpreted as flightiness, a need for flexibility in both schedules and responsibilities that can be used to carve out a very personal work/life balance, and — paradoxically, in the traditional view — a demand for meaningful, challenging work.

Maybe this is easier for me to see because I’ve made this trade-off longer and more consciously than a lot of people, albeit for a different reason.  Yes, I’m female but, frankly, leaning in and working long hours have never been issues for me.  (Those stories will have to wait for another post; for now, just trust me on this one, when it comes to long hours and asserting myself in discussions,  I’m certifiable.)

For me the trade-off was always about location.  In order to live where I wanted and with whom, I’ve bypassed a lot of opportunities.  It never occurred to me that this wasn’t a big trade-off or that it wouldn’t/shouldn’t cost me money and opportunities for rank and advancement.  And I have not always executed the trade-off gracefully.  My very first job out of college was with General Electric.  I had jumped through all the corporate recruiting hoops senior year to get the job.  GE did everything they could to attract me and make me welcome:  a top salary, an exciting career trajectory via a new corporate initiative, introductions to other young workers including helping me find temporary housing with some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  My manager even postponed my start date for 60 days after graduation so I could spend some time at home ‘one last time.’  I quit after two weeks.  Sigh. I’m not proud of it.  That’s not just ‘flighty’, it is the corporate equivalent of jilting your intended at the altar.  And it still haunts me in the occasional dark hour.  But how could I really know, till I got there, that I simply wasn’t willing to live anywhere in or near Bridgeport, Connecticut?  (No offense intended, current Bridgeportians — it was a personal thing for a kid who grew up in Montana, not a value judgement on your town.)

In the 35 years since then, I’ve moved around, living in Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon (on the coast, not Portland), New Hampshire again, Vermont, and now Wyoming.   And I’ve done some good work, if I do say so myself.  Worked for large companies and small, as an employee and a free-lancer.  Been the co-founder of a small technology start-up that established a new software market niche, employed 200+ people at one point, and, after 15 years, sold itself to a big company where, as far as I know, our software lives on.  Got to travel to New York City, regularly for a time, living a couple of days a week in a company apartment and soaking in one version of city life.  Made sales calls and worked trade shows in a lot of big U.S. cities.  Gone on marketing tours in Europe.  And, most memorably, got to hire and work with extraordinary people.

On reflection, I actually think I worked too many hours and leaned in at my co-workers a little too much for a lot of those years.  But I had a life, too.  With my husband, we have lived where we wanted, raised a family, gotten outdoors, and had adventures — although never enough, so we’re not done yet.

But now I’m on the other end of the stick. I’ve got a start-up of my own and I’m trying to attract employees.  And I have to deal with the fact that my start-up, my dream business, is my new employees’ day job.  This is a critical issue for me to address.

You’d think that, when trying to do a software startup in rural Wyoming, that just finding people qualified to do particular jobs would be the hard part.  And it sure is challenging.  But the fact is, great people live everywhere and almost all rural areas have long had a substantial segment of under-employed folks — people with the skills to live and work anywhere who, instead, live and work exactly where they choose.  They are needles in a huge haystack but, given that I don’t care if they are local or remote, I’m pretty sure that, over time, I can find people with the skills I need.

My bigger problem is that, just like any old MegaCorp these days, I have to face the fact that the job I offer is a “just the day job” and that the best people I can find will almost always already have a more important gig of their own.  It might be raising a family or finishing college or playing in a band or environmental activism or even ‘just’ wanting time to get outdoors a lot to ski or hike or hunt.  I have to find a way to reel them in, nurture their interest in the work I want them to do, and help them figure out a long-term fit between the work we share and their own priorities.

The upside is that these folks, when I do find them, are mostly already entrepreneurs.  Their real gig, whatever it is, probably demands they wear a lot of hats.  They are likely to know a lot more about marketing and about running a business than traditional job seekers used to know.  And they surely know a lot about trade-offs and flexibility and life/work changing out from under you in unpredictable ways.

So I believe I can make this work eventually, even I’m not getting it just right just yet.  I lost a good resource recently.  I thought my long term risk was that I was not giving her enough hours.  I thought she needed enough work  so she would feel comfortable turning down an upcoming seasonal job she wanted to avoid taking this year  So I kept coming up with more projects for her to do.  She seemed interested and enthusiastic and invested, even, in the outcomes.  Then she quit.  And hard as I tried to understand the little she would share with me about why, I’m still confused.  As far as I can tell, I crossed some sort of line and started sucking too much time and attention away from her own projects.  Leaning in a bit too far again, sigh.  (See why I don’t think that’s the answer?)

But one thing I do know:  this trade-off between work and life is no longer a woman’s issue or even an employee’s issue.  It’s an employer’s issue.  I don’t care what the overall job market is like.  The competition for the very best people is always going to be fierce and if we employers want great people to work for us and stay, WE have to help them find ways to make the day job fit the life, not the other way around.

For now, let me just say that, if you know a chem student with even half an idea for a game, you should tell him or her that the odds of any valid entry winning something are, well, quite good.

But why run a contest in the first place?  We’re in this business to make money not to give it away.  So what, specifically, was the contest intended to accomplish?  And how do we know, when we are done, if the project has been a success?  What are we trying accomplish?

1. The contest is a first and foremost a minimum viable product (MVP).  Although we aren’t charging money for it (in fact, we’re promising to give money to the winners), we have been asking instructors and students to spend time on it, an equally valuable although a lot less quantifiable commodity.  This MVP test of the learning game contest cuts two ways:
   1. Does the idea of ‘learning games’ resonate with students?  If we get a reasonable number of entries, we will have some evidence that students  dissatisfied with their current drill/study methods and think that online games and activities would be a nice alternative.
   2. Does it resonate with instructors?  We’ve asked instructors to pin up our poster and/or post a link to the game for students to follow.
2. The contest is intended to help us build our mailing lists and, again, there are two of these:  instructors and students.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO).  The white hat approach to SEO is to build great content and then seek legitimate links.  Ashley and Bret have been generating that great content for the last 6+ months; the contest is a way to generate more links.
4. Give me some talking points as I do phone and face-to-face interviews.  The contest experience, any entries we get, the sample entry we produced, and our simple implementation of it (Sig Fig Rules!) combine to give me a basis for doing face-to-face and phone interviews with instructors as we go forward.
5. Build our internal WordPress, Google Analytics, SEO, and other marketing skills. Nothing makes one a more effective writer, poster, analyst, strategist than doing each of those things, observing the results, and thinking about how to do them better next time.

I’ll report on how well this all actually worked after the contest, judging, and awarding are over.

• nothing about how well the ads are working for the advertisers,
• a lot about how increasingly mobile our readers and users are becoming, and
• an enormous amount about how well ads are doing as revenue generators for Facebook.

Source: OnlineMBA.com

The original idea for this product actually came from a conversation I had with Mark Burke of Voalte in July, 2010.  Voalte describes itself as providing “compelling software solutions for healthcare institutions that solve communication problems at the point-of-care.”  They concentrate on iPhone- and iPad-based solutions but Mark was kind enough to spend a bunch of time on the phone with me, talking about Android apps for nurses, and, among other nuggets, threw out a suggestion that we implement a ‘drip timer’ app.  TimerRN is a bit more general than that first idea. Nurses can set multiple timers and alarms for IV drips, medicines that have to be dispensed outside the standard schedule, getting patients ready for transport, or even to when to take their next break.

It’s been a busy month but Matt helped me make the effort to get TimerRN published.  We’ve made it as good as we can internally; it needs users working with it to get better.  And it’s great fun to have an even dozen Android apps in the Android Marketplace.

But one quote caught my eye.  Anindya Datta, founder of Mobilewalla, an ‘app analytics firm’ says that while “80% to 90% of apps are eventually deleted,” he considers any app that’s retained by 30% of downloaders to be “sticky.”

Guess what? By that measure, almost all of our apps are sticky!  I’d been feeling a bit down about the fact that ‘only’ half of the DOT Placards downloaders still have the app on their phone.  Guess I’m going to have to revise that emotion upward, eh?

I tossed our current download and install numbers into a spreadsheet:

Isn’t that cool?  With the exception of SnapTo Scott Hininger, which is a very, very niche app, ALL of the apps so far are sticky.

Generally, you’d expect retention numbers to go down as apps age; a user’s needs change after all.  But DOT Placards, our oldest app, is still above 50%. And check out PasswordRN.  The total install numbers may be miserable — I clearly have not yet found the right key to marketing it — but the retention rate is 100%!

DOT Placards Before

DOT Placards After

Note:  This is the somewhat techie version of this story.  If you don’t maintain your own website, you’re probably interested in the more business-oriented version here.

Having checked out our various web sites using both our own mobile devices and the nice HowToGoMo tool that I wrote about previously, it was pretty easy to decide that we needed to invest some time in trying to increase our sites’ mobile friendliness.  And it was easy to decide where to start.

We have four web sites that are ‘just’ WordPress installations.  WordPress is a set of free tools which started out being just for bloggers but has become the dominant easy-to-use website-building tool for thousands of sites, large and small.  Two of our sites, this Sherprog blog you are reading and our PlacardApp site,  use simple, standard WordPress themes.   Two of our sites, ChecklistRN and ElizabethGunn, use heavily customized themes that we developed in-house, although the graphic design for the ChecklistRN theme was done for us by the talented Julie Cornia.

So, it seemed reasonable to think that the right place to explore just how easy it could be to implement mobile-friendliness would be with our two simplest WordPress sites.  WordPress has a great community of users who develop and share tools, called plug-ins, that can add all sorts of different functionality to your site.  (Yep, like apps “there’s a plug-in for that.”)  Many  plug-ins are free; many have Pro or Plus versions that are available for a fee.

A quick search (‘wordpress mobile’) yields two types of results.  A bunch of apps that can be used to manage a site FROM a mobile device.  And, what we were looking for:  lists of plug-ins that can be used to make the website work better for mobile viewers.  A few minutes of exploring the plug-ins (I’ve never been a picky shopper), led us quickly to choose WPTouch:  free, ‘popular’ (for WordPress plug-ins that means much-used and proven to work) and easy-to-use, just my kind of tool.

If you use some other content management system for publishing your website, you’re likely to find a similar list of plug-ins available.  Most commercial vendors or developer communities should have them by now.

Still, since twiddling with my live websites is NOT my idea of a good time, Kim and I got together on a quiet Friday afternoon when we could concentrate and made sure we had a good back-up of Sherprog.com we could revert to if things went south on us.  But, remarkably, the process was pretty painless.  We went through it the first time very carefully, double checking our progress each step along the way, looking at the website with our desktop browsers and our mobiles, and making sure we were, at least, doing no harm.

You can see the results, which are dramatic, above.

We did actually have some confusion that day and for the next week or so due to interference from another plugin (SuperCache, if you’re curious, which is intended to make the web pages load faster).  But the problem showed up primarily when we tried to switch from the mobile to the regular version of the site and back again, which we didn’t expect a lot of users to try.  We eventually decided to disable SuperCache since we also use another performance optimization layer and decided that mobile-friendly was a lot more important for our simple pages.

As Kim summarized it after she’d gone through it again by herself for Placardapp.com, the steps are just:

1. Login to WordPress on your site as an Administrative user
2. Temporarily turn off any features that are caching your pages so you don’t get old versions as you test.
3. From the Dashboard list on the left, select the Plugins page,
   1. On the page, press the Add New button
   2. Search for ‘term’ WPtouch
   3. When found, press Install Now
4. When the installation is finished, go to the  Installed Plugins  page and find WPtouch
   1. Activate (if not already activated)
   2. Settings – change settings as needed, there are lots of them.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I have to admit that this free and easy process did not make my two sites completely mobile-friendly.  The free version of WPTouch does not change how the sites look on iPads.  The author of the tool has chosen to market that feature as a very reasonably priced add-on.  ($49 for one site, $99 for up to five sites, as of this writing.)  And I may go back and buy it, but I’m going to give the free version some shake-out time first AND see how WPTouch does on at least one of my more complicated sites before I commit.

If you have questions about our experiment, or you have conversion tales of your own to relate, please leave them as comments!

Sherprog After WPTouch

Sherprog Before WPTouch

I started writing a post about how easy it was for us to convert our two simplest websites to be mobile friendly.  It was pretty easy and you can see the big difference it makes.  But the details are probably only of interest to folks who have something of a DIYer relationship with their website(s).  If that’s you, check out my How easy was it? write-up.

However, if, like most business people, you had someone else build your website, you’re almost certainly going to have someone else make your mobile-friendly modifications, too.  So for you, the questions are more:  What should I expect, in terms of time and money?  How do I know if the person I’m talking is honest, competent, and going to do a good job?

Yikes, I can’t help you much with that last question.  If you don’t have a good working relationship with a website maintainer, now might be the time to cultivate one.  For me it’s like having a good working relationship with my car mechanic.  I need someone I can trust, someone who won’t talk down to or around me, who will do the work he or she CAN do, on time and right the first time, and who will refer me off to another competent professional when I need, say, body work that they are not equipped to do in-house.

On the other hand, how easy can it be to make your website mobile friendly?  Well, it CAN be very, very easy — taking only an hour or less.  Or, frankly, it can be hard and expensive — maybe involving an almost complete re-implementation.  And it all depends on how your current site was built in the first place.

But let me take some of the mystery out of this by pointing out a few things you might not know:

• Whenever someone accesses your website, your site can and does know an awful lot about that user and, in particular, the browser and device from which she is viewing it.  And the site can tell YOU what it knows.  If you use the free Google Analytics tool, check out the Technology / Browser&OS and Mobile / Overview pages.  (In the last month, of the 246 visits to this Sherprog.com site, 51, that is about 20%, were from mobile devices.  They were about evenly split between iOs and Android devices.  Only 5 visits were from iPads. If you aren’t using some sort of analytics tool, if you aren’t a couple of clicks away from knowing these numbers for your site, solve that problem first and worry about mobile-friendly afterwards.)
• Your website can change its behavior and appearance based on the device and browser.  In fact, all websites do this, all the time.  Dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Internet Explorer versus other, more standards-based browsers, has long been all in a day’s work for websites.
• When the site detects a mobile user, it has three options:
1. Do nothing special.  This usually amounts to being mobile-unfriendly although the site may be perfectly acceptable when viewed from a tablet versus a phone.
2. Apply a special ‘theme’ to your site’s content that works better for the mobile user than the standard theme. (Think of a theme as a sort of font, but for your website as a whole, not just the text.)
3. Redirect the whole session to another, slightly different web address, where part or all of your website has been re-implemented to be mobile-friendly.

As you might guess, if you can use option 2, making your website mobile friendly is going to cost a lot less than if you have to use option 3.  For our two simple sites, which are implemented using a very popular content management system, WordPress, and simple themes, it took us a couple of hours to convert the first site and half an hour to do the second, once we knew what we were doing.

We haven’t tried our two more heavily-customized WordPress sites yet.  I’ll report back on that when we get to it.  But I’m hoping that even they can be done in something like 4-8 hours each.

On the other hand, if you have a site that depends a lot on Flash animation, you are probably stuck with a partial or complete website re-write.  Flash doesn’t run on Apple iOs devices such as the iPad and iPhone.  This is probably one reason the number of Flash implementations is declining.  But, as of this writing, Flash is still used on about 25% of all sites.  How much you have to re-implement will be a function of how much Flash you have now.

There can also be other reasons to redirect mobile users and provide them some sort of parallel implementation:

• Make your pages ‘lighter’ so they load faster and eat less of the user’s data plan.
• Provide mobile users more (or less) functionality based on the capabilities of the device or your sense of what the mobile user will / will not want to do when compared with the desktop user.  But be wary of this approach — there is going to be less and less difference between the mobile user and the desktop user over time.
• Direct mobile users to a native app version of your functionality.  This is what the YouTube site does if I access it from my iPad.

If you have a mobile-friendly conversion experience of your own that you are willing to share or you have follow-up questions, please post them as comments.  I’m giving a talk on this topic at the Wyoming Gro-Biz and Idea Expo in a few weeks and could use some feedback on how useful this information is and/or what related questions folks have.

I grew up in a family business and remember the bad old days of computing payroll taxes ‘by hand’, looking them up from the tax tables one employee at a time, late into the night, every two-week pay period.   So for the most part, with QuickBooks to back us up, I consider most of our tax reports a little bit nervous-making (Do I have the right numbers?  Am I getting the reporting quarter checked off correctly?  Is that deadline date a post-marked date or a due-there date?) but laughingly easy to actually generate.

However, amazingly to me, there are still a few tax forms that can’t be just printed out on blank paper by QuickBooks.  All of the 109x series (Miscellaneous Income, Interest Income, and the like) come in multi-part forms that have to be TYPED.  So once a year, I drag out the old Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12 on which I typed my very first college paper (Europe in Medieval and Early Modern Times team taught then by Charles Wood and David Lagomarsino and, remarkably, still team taught by Lagomarsino and someone), plug it in, and hope that I still have at least enough ribbon to get through one more tax year.

I hate everything about getting out the old beast — it lives behind the foot-rest bar of my desk at home and is so heavy that I have to ask my husband to drag it out of its hidey-hole.  When I hit the power button, though, and it roars to life, I find myself unaccountably fond of it.  Everything about the Smith-Corona is loud —  the idling of the motor, the strokes of the keys, and, especially, the zip-whack of the Power Return button as the carriage grinds back to line up to the starting margin and hits the stop.  But sitting in front of it, going back to the high-stakes key strokes of my typing youth, just feels so . . . familiar.  It’s a lot like driving an old, rutted road back to some place you loved as a kid; not pleasurable exactly but ‘right’ in a deep way.

My own true typewriter love will always be the IBM Selectric.  I actually owned one once but left it behind at Tally Systems when we moved from Vermont to Wyoming.  What was I thinking when I decided to drag along the S-C and leave behind the Selectric?  Probably that, heavy as it is, the S-C was built to be a portable and the Selectric simply demands to live, in state, on a desk of its own.  Even in 1999, I assumed my days of needing any typewriter at all were limited and I couldn’t imagine giving a suitable home to a Selectric.  I’d find a place for it now, though, if I had the chance.

]]> http://sherprog.com/2012/01/22/tax-time-typewriter-time/feed/ 2 http://sherprog.com/2011/12/24/snaptome-email-delays-and-failures/ http://sherprog.com/2011/12/24/snaptome-email-delays-and-failures/#comments Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:58:45 +0000 ag http://sherprog.com/?p=498 Update:  22 Jan 2012

I’ve been using STM+ off and on over the holidays and it was always working well.  I took several big photos this morning and they appeared in my inbox very quickly.  And I never did get any support emails or negative comments in the Android Marketplace.

So whatever problem we were having for a while in December seems to have gone away.  Of course, the wise old tech support saying is:  Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves.  So we’ll be monitoring the STM products’ performance carefully.

I use our two photo sending apps, SnapToMe and SnapToMe Plus, all the time in my own work.  I’m always scribbling something on a whiteboard and needing to save it or show it to someone.  Snap!  And just the other day, Matt and I put together a low-fidelity mockup of a new user interface with sticky notes and needed to send it to a customer for review.  Snap!

In the past week, I’ve had a couple of days where emails from SnapToMe Plus were delayed for up to 24 hours and emailing from SnapToMe simply failed outright.  We’ve narrowed this down to being pretty certainly an issue with our email hosting service and have begun researching alternatives.  But, frankly, it’s Christmas time and we’re also trying to take some dedicated time off to be with our families.

So, please, if you are experiencing problems with one of the SnapTo’s let us know at support@sherprog.com.  We’d like to take our time, understand the problem more thoroughly, and be deliberate in our choice of what service to try next.  But if the products are working badly for a lot of users, we’ll do what we can to accelerate a solution.  Meantime, keep your eye out for an update to your app and, when you see one, please accept it.

Thanks for your patience and support.

ag