Simon Willison's Weblog: software

Semantic Versioning

2009-12-15T21:53:18+00:00

Tom Preston-Werner provides a name, specification and URL describing the relatively widely used Major.Minor.Patch versioning system. This is really useful—by giving something a name and a spec, people can say “this project uses semantic versioning” and skip having to explain their backwards compatibility policy in full.

Tags: naming-things, open-source, semantic-versioning, software, tom-preston-werner, versioning

Quoting Kroc Camen

2008-07-04T09:03:46+00:00

A printer driver is a folder with one ".ini" file, and a couple of ".dll"s and that's it. It is not a 50 MB download. It is not an IE Toolbar, and Side Pane. It is not half-baked photo software. It is not a splash screen when your computer starts. It is not a tray icon.

— Kroc Camen

Tags: kroccamen, printerdrivers, software

How to sell your software for $20,000

2008-06-28T09:21:15+00:00

How to sell your software for $20,000

The best article I’ve read on software entrepreneurship in ages.

Via Hacker News

Tags: business, entrepreneurship, software, startups

Camouflage

2008-06-15T18:29:19+00:00

Camouflage

My other key piece of OS X presenting software—hides all of the icons on the desktop (no need to drag them all in to an “Archive” folder every time I give talk).

Tags: camouflage, macos, presenting, software

Caffeine

2008-06-15T18:27:17+00:00

Caffeine

I’ve been using this for several months and I love it: it’s a simple OS X menu bar icon that lets you prevent your Mac from dimming the screen, going to sleep or starting a screen saver. Perfect for giving presentations and watching Flash movies full screen.

Tags: caffeine, macos, presenting, software

MacHeist Bundle

2008-01-16T21:44:17+00:00

MacHeist Bundle

Everything’s now unlocked, meaning you can pick up TaskPaper, CSSEdit, Snapz Pro X (excellent for screencasts) and Pixelmator for $49.

Tags: cssedit, mac, macheist, macos, pixelmator, screencasts, snayzprox, software, taskpaper

Quoting Jon Hicks

2007-12-20T15:09:02+00:00

I don't even use Firefox and Firebug anymore, the revised Web Inspector in Leopard has been incorporated in Coda and that does everything I need and more.

— Jon Hicks

Tags: coda, css, debugging, firebug, firefox, html, jon-hicks, leopard, software, webinspector

WriteRoom

2006-11-15T07:52:07+00:00

I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn't impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I'm completely sold. It's a free text editor for OS X with two killer features:

A full screen mode (toggle with ESC) that hides the rest of your screen, letting you type in glorious green-on-black courier with absolutely no distractions.
Autosave. You never have to save a document, even when you quit WriteRoom. It maintains a list of your WriteRooms in the file menu, keying each on the first few words. If you want to move text to an actual file you need to either export it or use copy and paste.

I've lost count of the number of times I've lost some notes to a crash having scrawled them in TextMate or SubEthaEdit without saving to a file. Auto-save / auto-recovery should be built in to every application.

Tags: lhl, macos, software, writeroom

Do Content Management Systems really work?

2005-02-17T22:28:00+00:00

My answer to Do Content Management Systems really work? on Ask MetaFilter

Have you considered trying a Wiki? In my experience, the more permissions / workflow / etc you have in a CMS the more likely it is that people won't use it. Wikis may be a little unconventional but the barrier to entry is fantastically low and they can work extremely well (I like MediaWiki or TaviWiki myself).

I'm very skeptical of the idea that the people who update an intranet should be limited. If you have an employee who can't be trusted to edit information on an intranet, why did you hire them in the first place? In my opinion the presence of a revision log should be enough to deter any abuse - if someone screws up, just revert their change and have a word with them about it.

Tags: ask-metafilter, business, cms, information, software, management, administration, training

More lightweight software: SQLite

2003-03-12T23:47:16+00:00

The other toy I've been playing with recently is SQLite. SQLite is an embeddable SQL database engine written in just under 25,000 lines of (heavily commented) C. Don't let the size fool you - it's phenomenally powerful and is released under a no-holds-barred public domain license that practically begs you to include it in your applications, commercial or not.

The feature list is pretty awesome - it's two times faster than both mySQL and Postgres on simple operations, implements an impressive amount of the SQL92 standard (including transaction support) and has bindings for Tcl, PHP, Perl, Python and Java.

That said, the lack of a security model (databases are stored in a single file with no user authentication / permissions system) and the fact that it's very much meant for embedding rather than featuring a client-server model mean it isn't really suitable for web applications. Where it would shine (and where the author D. Richard Hipp intended it to be used) is in applications that would benefit from an ultra fast relational database but don't need the overhead of embedding a large system such as mySQL. The no-strings license makes it a tempting prospect for that kind of work as well.

Definitely one for the tool box.

Tags: c, software, sqlite, d-richard-hipp