Brian Hartsock's Blog

While I am giving mad props to Mailtrust, big high-five to the Sync team for launching iPhone Sync for Noteworthy.

Sync for BlackBerry owns me. If only I could switch to an iPhone now.

Mailtrust just held a discussion on Open Source Software in Business after hours tonight. It was open to the public, and we had a fairly good turnout, ~25 people.

Here are my takeaways.

A lot of people view closed source software vs. OSS as Microsoft vs. Linux.

There are tons myths about open source and closed source, which can be very misleading to non-technical people.

Since OSS is usually driven by developers fulfilling their own needs, the end product can sometimes be lacking important functionality.

Many open source projects lack marketing, big surprise, so wider audiences don’t realize alternatives to closed source projects exist.

There are many ways to try and make money off OSS, such as different licensing or support. No one really thought the donation model is that viable in the long run.

Nick V., a fellow Mailtruster, had a great point that OSS always has potential, whereas closed source doesn’t.

As for what I think, let the best software win.

I wrote another post on the Mailtrust blog. Check it out.

For anyone developing a web or desktop app, there are a lot of challenges in UI design. This post tried to show how the Control Panel team dealt with some of those challenges and are constantly evolving into a better application.

I use Noteworthy Webmail all day, every day. Yes I work for Mailtrust. Yes I coded on the Webmail team for a while. But that doesn’t change the fact I love the webmail interface.

Yesterday, I got back to my desk after a meeting and started attacking the 30 emails that had accumulated during that time. After reading through them, the next step was deleting because I use my Inbox like a task list. While doing this, something dawned on me. My favorite webmail feature is the one I don’t think about. It is the one I use every day. Check-Drag.

Check-Drag is the ability to click on a checkbox, hold the mouse button down, and select other checkboxes by dragging the mouse over them. Hopefully the video below illustrates how this works. Using it has become second nature, so the only time I notice it is when I am using a different application that doesn’t support it.

Webmail still supports shift-click and ctrl-click, but check-drag is just easier to use in my opinion.

As a side note, this is my first screencast Feel free to mock and heckle me. Also, tell me if you think it is stupid, or good. If it could be better, tell me how. I hate watching it because I hate the sound of my voice. At this point in my life, I believe I am ready to take the criticism that my peers might have

Today Mailtrust held its first all-day development conference. In my opinion, it was awesome. Not because it was great, but because it wasn’t bad. Like any first-time, there are a ton of things we can do better for future conferences, but the goal of spreading knowledge throughout the development environment was met.

When I first started coding in VB6 on Webmail.us’s corporate website, I never imagined the day I would help organize a conference for all their developers (PS – That is the corporate website when I started found via archive.org. You have to check it out). Then, communicating a new concept was as simple as turning around in your chair or waiting till everyone met up for dinner and drinks after work. With the growth of the company, communication isn’t as easy.

Our goal was to spread knowledge to everyone, and even more specifically the new people. One of the key topics today was on MySQL, a topic some of us can talk about for hours. Too often, we take that knowledge for granted. Not everyone has had as much experience with MySQL, especially hires right out of college. Getting everyone on the same page with certain topics was the goal today. Hopefully screen casts of the talks can help future hires ramp up faster as well.

But, there are always things we can improve upon. Here a list of 5 things that we can do better for next time:

• Plan the setup better. Make sure everyones files are on the presentation machine, and have breaks setup so there aren’t lulls between talks.
• Don’t rely on the internet. Holiday Inn’s free wifi isn’t geared towards 30 developers.
• Don’t eat mexican for lunch. It is delicious, but takes away from the second half of the conference if you know what I mean.
• Give every speaker enough time, and push them to fill it but not go over.
• Lastly, I would like to figure out how to go more in depth with some of the topics. Maybe have different tracks so people can choose? We might need 30 more developers before this is feasible though

Thanks to Lindsey, Matt, and Kevin for making it all happen.