I will be speaking this Thursday, October 26 at 6 pm ET at the online ColdFusion User Group run by Charlie Arehart. The topic is on building software that people will use.

http://coldfusion.meetup.com/17/boards/view/viewthread?thread=3722239

You can join in from anywhere - so feel free to stop on by.

A big thank you to the Cleveland Adobe User Group for hosting me last week. We had a good session on designing software and on using project management software.

Thank you to Mike Cooper for arranging the meeting and to Lodestone Digital for hosting it.

Congratulations to Brian Meloche on becoming an Adobe Community Expert (an ACE)! Brian has been active in the ColdFusion Community for years. Most recently he hosted some of the best sessions at MAX on ColdFusion. Congratulations on a well-deserved achievement.

The Vertabase Timer alpha is now available for download for free at http://timer.vertabase.com

It runs on Adobe’s new AIR platform.  It runs on both MAC and Windows.
It is great for timing anything, produces a nice time report and exports the data to xml.

What do you think of it?

Its a week past due but thank you to the Charlotte Adobe Users Group.  Had a great time with great people and lots of good conversation (both during and after the meeting). 

We talked about everything from software design, user adoption and project management to where is Adobe and ColdFusion going, and what technologies will stand the test of time.

Thank you to Sutton for putting it all together, to Lodestone Digital to hosting and to everyone who attended.

I’ll have the pleasure of speaking at the Charlotte, North Carolina Adobe Users’ Group (Adobe Charlotte) on Thursday, September 20th.

The topic will be on how design, technology and feature choices affect usability -using examples and feedback from Vertabase project management.

The meeting will take place at 6PM at Lodestone Digital, 5605 Seventy-Seven Center Dr., Suite 285, Charlotte, NC. For more information, please visit http://www.adobecharlotte.com.

A big thank you to the Toronto ColdFusion’s User Group for having me at their meeting on Wednesday -and for the “after party”

It was a pleasure meeting everyone. 

Great presentations from Ryan Favro, Byron Bignell and Laurence Middleton on CF8. And very enjoyable conversations.   Thank you to Clayton Partridge for putting it all together.

Looking forward to next time.

I’ll be speaking to software developers and ColdFusion fans at the Toronto ColdFusion Users’ Group (Toronto CFUG) meeting on Wednesday, August 15 at 7 pm ET. This is a special meeting and launch party for ColdFusion 8 (CF8) in the Toronto area. 

Come on by -there will even be a chance to win a copy of CF8!

To attend or for more information visit http://www.cfugtoronto.org/ 

I will be speaking on effective project management, particularly for development projects and IT implementations. I’ll also be giving a walk-through of Vertabase Pro, an enterprise project management application written in Adobe’s ColdFusion.  (Its a great alternative to MS Project.)

Recent talk on the scalability of Ruby on Rails (RoR) to build a web application more advanced than Basecamp (by 37signals, the creators of RoR) e.g. this from AKuAKu coming back from the Ruby on Rails unconference Rails Camp:

“The performance and scaling session which lasted about 5 minutes when no one could advance the high water mark for rails apps past basecamp.”

Reminds me of some earlier posts by Ben Forta, ColdFusion guru and related CF posts on the advantages of using ColdFusion (and ColdFusion on Wheels) to build larger scale apps.

To see a difference: in the project management software space compare Basecamp to Vertabase Pro (you can request a trial off the site). Vertabase Pro is written in CF.

I’ve found that a lot innovation floating around is cool, but doesn’t necessarily solve any problems or help make people’s worklife easier. This is nothing new. Useless innovation has been around forever. But it seems that the pace has picked up on software being released that doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

Wonder if it has anything to do with more developers spending time on blogs, reading the latest success stories or latest technologies and trying to hop on the wave without understanding the fundamental problems being solved or the thinking that goes on behind the design of the functionality?

How has software already changed now that so many developers get input directly from the blogosphere? Is it creating software that solves problems better? Or, does it just increase the tempation to create something that rides latest, greatest tech buzz?