Week in review
I recently did some Drupal work for a client, which turned out to be a bit of fun. The Google Custom Search service is a service that can be integrated into websites for a branded/focused version of google’s efficient, accurate search facility. The Drupal module for this service had only been released for 5.x, so I got to work and backported a version for 4.7.x for a client. Was refreshing to do a bit of open source work - if you want to check it out, see this page: Google_cse: I’d love a release for Drupal 4.7.6.
In other news, I took the plunge and decided to indulge in some computer upgrades for my secondary machine i.e. Games and Photoshop (shamefully running Windows XP):
- 2GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 RAM
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Duel Core CPU
- Samsung 20″ Widescreen LCD 206BW (1680 x 1050 resolution goodness)
I hadn’t spent any money on computer components for quite a while, so I guess its not that bad. Before, during and after the upgrades, I conducted some benchmarks to see how it improved my frame rates, check out the results over on the EGN Forums.
Onto other news, I had a bit of a winge over on the Freshbooks Forums for their lack of effort on progress for features that assist non-American’s. It’s frustrating to say the least. I also can’t stand it how companies want to brand everything as much as possible to market things to their advantage.
Heading to RFLan tomorrow, should be abit of fun - haven’t been to a LAN that I haven’t been involved in organising, for at least 4/5 years.
Hey Alex,
Just a quick note to let you know how valuable this kind of honest frustration (feedback? ) is to us at FreshBooks. So you know, we’re actually ramping up our product team right now to accelerate development. Justin (crack developer and new hire who has been with us for a month now, though we have yet to announce him publicly) is just about to refactor all our gateways. Once that’s done it’s going to be a lot easier for us to add additional gateways like EWAY. As for branding everything, that is a problem we have chosen not to solve so far. It’s not that we want to brand everything (as that thread outlines we offer an unbranded billingarm.com option), it’s that most of our customers are not technical enough to appreciate the solution as you do. Given that most people don’t even know they can do what you want to do, we’ve elected to apply our limited resources elsewhere. We will likely get solve this someday, but it’s not top of our list right now (unlike gateways which are).
I hope all that makes sense. We/I really appreciate heart felt commentary like yours.
Thanks for sounding off,
- Mike (FreshBooks co-founder and CEO)
Mike,
It’s not every day the CEO of a company comments on your blog.
Thanks for the comment, and explanation - understand completely and look forward to some progress in the near future.
- Alex
Alex,
I read with interest your post over on the FreshBooks forums and would be really interested in talking with you more about the needs of customers in Australia and New Zealand. Last week we launched our invoicing service, AcuInvoice, and are in the middle of what will be a substantive feature roll out over the next several weeks. Importantly, AcuInvoice will truly be an international product and, as such, we would value feedback from customers such as you. In particular, you will be interested to know that just today AcuInvoice instituted support for the domain mapping feature you requested. While the folks at FreshBooks are correct regarding the SSL issue, we would be happy to help install a reasonably priced certificate to secure your domain. I’d encourage you to take a look at the product and sign up for our very robust (and entirely free) beta tester plan; I think you’ll find that the feature set is likely suitable for your needs and that our development team will be very responsive to your feedback. Also, if you feel as if support for EWay or a similar service would be beneficial (and there is some additional endorsement of this sentiment from others), I can make a personal guarantee that we will support such a gateway in the coming weeks. I’d encourage you to keep up with our feature releases via our blog as well as our soon-to-be released user forum.
Regards,
Sidney VanNess, Ph.D.
Cheers Alex
- mike