it made me run for the apple store :-)

Good things come to those who wait: The famous MindManager is available in a Mac-version. It literally made me run for the Apple store.

New comments (August 2006), after several weeks of more-or-less intensive usage:

• from build 548 the spotlight integration really works


• I'm missing the web export from the windows version


• I'm missing the "send-to-mindmanager" feature to create new maps from existing topics


• I'm using MindManager more and more in union with OmniOutliner - too bad I cannot link from topics to single entries within an outline (OmniGroup told me this is an upcoming feature of V4)

Nonsense 2.0

Web 2.0: quite established term, since Tim O'Reilly published his scene-setting & eye-opening article on that topic. Its mostly about user-experience, social networking and the like. Go read it, just in case you're not familiar with web 2.0.

Later came Identity 2.0 - a fantastic presentation. Even later cam OpenSource 2.0 (brief report in German)...

Then some sh** hit some fan: An undisclosed company came up with Security 2.0.(via Stefan). Which actually made me think of some further developments in this "too-dot-oh" direction: Is the term "nonsense 2.0" copyrightable? Or is this stuff just too-dot-oh-much for me?

By the way: I'm forty-too-dot-oh years old, and my cars' licence plate carries the number six-four-too-dot-oh. Gosh, somebody hopefully will find out that I'm modern-too-dot-oh.

In case you're agile AND don't like to read much...

have a look at the short Agile Work Cheat Sheet. I summarizes the fundamental ideas which help to successify (not only IT-) projects...

Hint (don't tell your boss that I told you!): hack' your managers' windooze-box and make the cheat-sheet his or hers browser-homepage :-)

Summary of "Golden Rules of Consulting"

Quite a long time ago I collected some ideas on the general topic of consulting from various internet sources. My favourite result came from the Old Dominion University, an educational institution, somewhere in the U.S. The rules were presumably written up by Dr. Yoon.

I found these set of rules fits to my personal style - so I'd like to summarize the basic ideas here

• First-time customers buy "what you know". Repeating customers buy "who you are".
• Know your customers: Make sure what you're offering is what they are willing to pay good money for.
• Give your customers more than they expect.
• Aim higher than you commit. Work better than you promised.
  
• The high road is a two-way street. There is seldom a need to work for a bad customer.
• Learn when to "no bid": When you and your customer are mismatched, don't take the work.
• Retrain yourself constantly. Learn a "big new thing" every year.
• Contributing is marketing (aah, see arc42 for one of my personal examples)
• Slow times come when you can least handle them. Same is valid for fast times.
  

Agile Development with .NET

A recent survey of a development site (lets call it "FooBar" here, to keep my client undisclosed) positively surprised me: A team of >20 persons in a highly productive (agile & iterative) setting, completely based on (new!) Microsoft tool-chain with Visual-Studio Team Server as the foundation. Forget about the old days, when Visual-Source-Safe did everything to ruin your day (Alain called it source destruction system...)- now its Team-Foundation-Server (TFS) making your day, really!

Until now I was really fond of Twiki/bugzilla/Excel combination to track and manage iterative development, even in non-Java environments. My positive impression of TFS changed that:

• The "FooBar" guys integrated their favorite UML-tool seamlessly into TFS: Whenever somebody changes a use-case or activity-diagram, corresponding features or tasks are created (or updated) within TFS
• The project-internal decision process is mapped onto TFS entries
• TFS handles the complete bug-tracking (sorry to say, Joel, might make FogBugz life harder)
• The iteration-coach can export burndown-charts and calculate development speed based only on TFS data - making that a really agile experience.

So - all that is possible with Wikis, Bugzilla and Excel- but certainly less integrated. I'll get myself a license asap :-)