Doctor Deploys Blog

This afternoon Dare Obasanjo tweeted a link with a comment that caught my eye, "The rise of software as entertainment instead of productivity - http://kickingbear.com/blog/archives/67". A quick warning before you follow that link: there are plenty of words in there NSFW. Expletives aside it triggered an interesting thought.

Guy English is the author of above linked blog entry and a developer for Tapulous, makers of the iPhone hit game Tap Tap Revenge. As Dare’s tweet suggests Guy’s post is about entertainment software. Guy calls it "Pop Software". Interestingly, Guy immediately belittles the terms "Software" and "Applications" suggesting that entertainment is found in "Apps":

“Apps� is fun. It’s fun to say, it sounds unthreatening, it’s a word sufficiently abbreviated that it takes on a life of its own without dragging to the forefront of peoples minds the more sterile and technical sounding “application�. Apps are not Applications – they are their own things. They are smaller. They are more fun. Apps are treats atop your technological sundae. They are not potential time sinks. They are neither burden nor investment. They each represent a nugget of fun, of fleeting amusement. Apps are gobbled up in the millions by people who would never rush so willy nilly to buy desktop software. Apps are Pop Software writ large in blinking neon lights.

All of this reminded me of "Snack Apps". I think I first heard the term used by Peter Marcu. Snack Apps are small apps that do one thing or don’t really do anything… but entertain. As a software engineer (with all the importance that title implies) it is easy to dismiss Snack Apps.

But would happen if one was take Snack Apps seriously? That’s what Dare and Guy got me thinking about.

Original post by Rob Mensching

A week+ ago, I posted a blog entry noting that the WiX toolset was out of beta not in it. I also mentioned that we are now in the "release candidate" mode and provided a quick definition to differentiate it from "beta" mode. A few days later Steven Sinofsky posted a entire blog entry about Windows 7 entering the Release Candidate milestone. In typical Sinofsky-style, Steven posted a much longer definition of release candidate and placed it in context with the other typical milestones at Microsoft.

Now I’m still a little flexible with some of the bugs we’ll take into the WiX toolset even though we are in release candidate mode. For example, as I mentioned in comments previously we took the MSI 5.0 changes late in WiX v3 for three reasons:

1. Staying current with the Windows Installer is important for the WiX toolset.
2. Implementing the Windows Installer beta functionality helps them find bugs.
3. The next official release of the WiX toolset (after v3) will be available quite a while after Windows 7 ships, the MSI 5.0 functionality may be required by our customers before then.

We also still have some work to integrate Votive with the next version of Visual Studio. That work will be coming in late since we’re waiting for their beta.

Anyway, I hope that provides some more detail about how we’re approaching the end game for WiX v3. Getting the bug found and count down to zero is our primary focus. That and having a little fun along the way.

Original post by Rob Mensching