Things change fast around here.

After 11 years of adult leadership in (first) Cub Scouts and (later) Boy Scouts, my wife and business partner, Sherry, has decided to reduce her active role. She decided that it was time to resign from her position as Scoutmaster for Boy Scout Troop 2, and also to transition from her role as Charter Organization Representative for Cub Scout Pack 224/Marble Elementary School. She will remain an adult leader, working with Venture Crew 22, which involves boys and girls ages 14 through 21 but requires a smaller time commitment. This allows her to spend more time just with our family.

As it turns out, this change comes just in time. Tomorrow, James has another taping of QuizBusters, where East Lansing meets Eaton Rapids in the first round of the tournament. (East Lansing was in the last qualifying match and then ended up in the first tournament game.) At almost the same time, William has his first read-through for his role as Ralphie in a stage production of A Christmas Story. (Unfortunately, the script has not yet arrived, so a viewing of the movie will have to suffice for familiarization until tomorrow.) Thankfully, we both have the time to get them where they need to be, though we can each only watch one event.

This reminds me of an amusing idea told me by a parent who experienced the shock of going directly from one child to four by virtue of triplets. He said that parenting was like playing defense: with one or two, you can play man-to-man, but once you have three or more, you need to switch to zone.

A game product is resuscitated.

Back on April 16, I wrote a memorial to MVP Backgammon Professional on the fifth anniversary of the final beta build of the game. At that time, the project was presumed dead. The publisher, MVP Software, had not released a product nor significantly updated its web page in about four years.

Lo and Behold! In late July, MVP Software finally released MVP Backgammon Professional, much to my surprise and delight. Of course, I found out about the release by accidentally, first by coincidentally seeing its listing on a download site, followed a week or two later by an email from a fan of the game. Thankfully, they made up for that oversight by providing me (upon my request) with a copy of the full game, and I have finally been able to take a few minutes to tell everybody about it.

This is not a normal game review, because I am in no way unbiased. We, SophSoft, wrote the bulk of the game, meaning every last bit of it through the aforementioned beta release, and did most of the artwork for the game as well. One could certainly assume that I would be inclined to praise our portion and may be disposed to criticize the rest, so read this commentary with that in mind.

First of all, let us start with some of The Good. Most of the primary functionality is unchanged from the beta version of five years ago, yet it still holds up well. The program plays a strong game of Backgammon, especially the Copernicus personality (an expert neural network). We had suggested a windowed mode in addition to full screen (and wrote the code to easily support it), and they apparently decided that this was a good idea and added it. Some of the dialog boxes were changed from our last version, and for the most part, the changes were beneficial. Best of all, for us, is that MVP showed real class and left all of the original credits intact, merely adding more of their own.

Now, here is a little bit of The Bad, with regard to the program itself. The pubeval personality, which was a very simple (classic) neural network evaluator, was removed, leaving a large strength gap among evaluators; Gerry Tesauro, who wrote the original pubeval, is still thanked in the credits, though. In five years, we probably could have improved Copernicus, but I suspect that its strength is now somewhat less than GNU Backgammon, which has continued to be improved in the interim. Had I been given a chance, I would have added antialiasing to make the checkers look better on the board (given the faster machines of today), and I would have altered the right mouse button interface. Also, the grafting of the ‘5’ (over a ‘1’) to update the splash screen copyright date looks poor. Why was it not 2006, anyway?

The biggest disappointment with program operation, for me, was that MVP removed all of the direct peer-to-peer networking and replaced it with their Classic Entertainment Online service. The beta version allowed users to connect via Internet, LAN, modem, or serial cable, as well as via the (unfinished) CEO. In the release version, only the latter option is available, albeit complete now. My opinion has not changed in the half year since the previous post that MVP Backgammon Pro should have been released five years ago without CEO, and then an update could be released later (with sales in the meantime). This argument is bolstered by the fact that I have checked CEO many times over the last couple of months and there has never been another backgammon player online (and that is the only game currently supported).

That last part was, of course, a marketing problem rather than any issue with the game itself. Marketing is not a science, so I may be wrong, but I feel that there are several errors in this area, specifically with the limitations of the trial version. The trial omits the Copernicus evaluator, which is the strongest one available, so there is no way to know how strong the program really is without buying it. Actually, it not clear during the trial period that this is the case, so many (if not most) players will probably assume that the AI is weak, because they can only see the deliberately crippled evaluator. Likewise, there are three different board sets, plus three checker sets, with only one each available in the trial, but this is not obvious either.

Ironically, I did not see any way to print an order form from within the program, though that was ostensibly the reason for us parting ways. MVP Software did not like our cost estimate for adding the ability to print an order form (instead of just opening a form in NotePad and letting the user print from there). They demanded that we add the feature for free, claiming that they had three “experts” who said that it would take them no more than 15 minutes to add printing capability. I responded: “In that case, why are you still talking to me?” (Clearly, there was some deeper problem there, but we never found out what it was.)

The bottom line is that MVP Backgammon Professional is a good backgammon program that is fun to play. Even though there was nowhere near five years worth of improvement since we last worked on the game, it still stands up today and is better than most backgammon software on the market. The drawbacks are not severe, and perhaps will give MVP Software something to improve in the future.

It is about time for me to brag about my family a bit.

One of the great things about being ones own boss and working from a home office is that it is possible to keep ones priorities straight and stay involved with family activities. Ironically, with my priorities, the more eventful my personal life becomes and the more development to be done, the less I am able to post about it here. Nevertheless, there is a lot of news, so I start with my family.

My younger son, William, recently auditioned for Sunsets with Shakespeare, a local theatre company, for their upcoming stage production of the classic, A Christmas Story. Despite trying out on a whim, and having the desire but no acting experience beyond school plays, he apparently nailed the audition. William was offered (and accepted) the lead child role, Ralphie. We are very proud of him. The most common response of congratulations: “You’ll shoot your eye out, kid!”

My older son, James, has been participating in Quiz Bowl, and last night he (and the rest of his team) participated in a taping of QuizBusters, a local tournament/television program. This was the first match for the East Lansing Trojans this season, and the first time that James started on the team of four. They are the defending Grand Champions from last year, and James was the only new player. Their competition was the Hastings Saxons (ironically, his mother’s high school). The show will not air until January 28, 2007, so skip the next paragraph if you do not want a spoiler.

[SPOILER]
James definitely performed well, having the best overall record on the “pop quiz” segments. East Lansing won the game over Hastings easily, not only qualifying for the tournament, but doing so as the top seed (of 64 schools).
[/SPOILER]

I cannot forgot my lovely wife, Sherry, who is the Scoutmaster for Boy Scout Troop 2, which recently (on Halloween) celebrated its 85th anniversary. Troop 2 is the oldest Boy Scout troop in the area, almost as old as scouting in the United States, and is actually older than the Chief Okemos Council, to which it belongs. Sherry received her Wood Badge, the highest training an adult leader (and any woman in Boy Scouts) can earn. Earlier this year, she was honored with the District Award of Merit for “outstanding service to youth of this community through idealism and citizenship.”

Me? I work hard in order to provide opportunities for my family, support them in their endeavors as much as possible, and feel a great deal of pride for such accomplishments. I certainly could have had much more money taking a different tack, but I seriously doubt that I could have been any richer.

Today is Election Day in the United States.

In the event that you are reading this on Tuesday, November 7, and you have not yet voted, stop reading blogs and do something truly important. Get informed about the candidates and issues, and then GO VOTE!

This is my one and only report on this conference.

Life happens, and it did again this year. Personal matters intervened, and I was unable to attend all three days of FuturePlay 2006 in London, Ontario. Instead, I drove up on Wednesday in order to speak that afternoon, and drove back home that evening. Yes, I spent more time on the road than at the conference, and I did not get into “conference mode” before I left.

I was at FuturePlay 2006 to speak on the Video Game Development Business Essentials panel. My co-panelists were Dr. Ricardo Rademacher, Gjon P. Camaj, and Matt Toschlog. We all decided not to create any slides or other visual presentations for this panel, so we were all able to complete our notes within hours of the panel. Gjon and Matt worked off of hand-written notes, while I read notes from a text document on my laptop. We were going to speak for 10 minutes each, leaving 20 minutes for questions and answers. As Ricardo pointed out, as moderator, one could tell that he was the youngest as he was the only panelist in a suit. We calculated that the panel had more than 60 years of game development experience in total.

The first to present was Gjon Camaj of Image Space. He spoke about the history of his company and how they found themselves moving from computer (non-game) simulations into the game industry, where they created such games as F1 2002 (my favorite racing game to date) and Nascar Thunder 2004 for EA Sports. He then talked about the transition that they made to self-publishing and electronic software distribution (ESD) with their latest game, rFactor. (I will certainly be trying rFactor this weekend.)

The next presenter was Matt Toschlog of Reactor Zero. Matt is probably best known as the programmer of the classic game, Descent (which recently received an honorable mention in the Quantum Leap Awards for First-Person Shooters). He spoke about the more traditional publishing model and how his smaller company is working within that framework in their current game development efforts.

The penultimate presented was our moderator, Ricardo Rademacher of Futur-E-Scape. He spoke about the issues involved in developing games in conjunction with academia and funded via grants. The talk was given as a pre-postmortem, listing 5 things that have gone right and 5 more that have gone wrong, so far, in his development of a massively multiplayer online physics game, Physics Adventures in Space Time. There was good advice contained in both halves.

I was the final presenter, and my bio was listed in the program this way:

Gregg Seelhoff is the principal at Digital Gamecraft, a division of a game company he founded 24 years ago. He spent several years in the retail game industry, programming on more than a dozen boxed titles for companies such as Quest Software, Electronic Arts, Epyx, Zombie, Legend Entertainment, GT Interactive, and Microsoft. He was Senior Software Engineer at Spectrum HoloByte, where he served as Lead Programmer on Star Trek: The Next Generation, “A Final Unity”. More recently, his company has operated as an independent game developer, working primarily in the casual games space, developing products published online and delivered electronically, including titles such as MVP Backgammon Professional and Pretty Good MahJongg. His Gamecraft blog can be read at http://www.gamecraft.org/.

For my part, I spoke about micro-ISVs, software companies (such as ours) that consist of a very small number of people (1-3). The term was coined by Eric Sink, originally meaning a company of just one person, but I (and others) expand that definition slightly. I presented some ideas about who could do well as a micro-ISV and who would not, a brief discussion of the possible business structures, and the advantages and disadvantages of micro-ISVs for game development, mostly omitting the self-publication and distribution aspects already covered briefly by Gjon.

I ended the talk by recommending a book, Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality by Bob Walsh, as a decent authority on the subject. To drive home the point, I read this (only) quote from the inside front cover by Thomas Warfield, of Goodsol Development, one of the most successful micro-ISVs: “If you are looking to start your own small software company (or have just started doing so), buy this book. There is nothing else available like it that covers so much territory about the basics of starting and running a small software company. Just buy it and read it.” [from A Shareware Life blog]

All of us rushed through our presentations, but we still cut into the Q&A period significantly. There were a few questions, and then we cleared out for the break before the final session of the day. Overall, I thought that the session went quite well, though it seemed that we could certainly have used more time to speak.

For the final session of the day, after some hallway networking, I slipped into the Emerging Input/Output in Games paper session. I missed some of the first paper (of two), HaptiCast: A physically-based 3D game with haptic feedback, though one can find the HaptiCast project on SourceForge. The second paper, Human Motion as Input and Control in Kinetic Games, was quite interesting, discussing possibilities (see title) beyond the Sony EyeToy and Dance Dance Revolution. I asked a question about input latency and in return got to explain the reasons while latency of hea
d tracking technology causes physiological illness to the audience. I am sure that I will explain it in this blog sooner or later.

After that session, there was the “Wine & Cheese Reception” in which I consumed neither wine nor cheese, but did look at the game competition entries and the research posters, while networking with other attendees. The documentary, Beyond Pong: The Evolution of Video Games (in which I appear), was played on a big screen, and several of us saw our own likenesses larger than life, all while trying to schmooze. That was cool and weird all at once. I headed for the door about half an hour after Wednesday at the conference officially ended, preparing for the drive home in very rainy and windy weather.

I made a few ex-conference observations. On the way into London, I found an intersection (Wharncliffe & Southdale) where there were, seriously, two separate Tim Hortons across from each other. On the way out, I took a slightly different route and inadvertently discovered the Guy Lombardo Museum (but did not stop). The international border crossing into Canada (Port Huron/Sarnia) had absolutely no delay (at midday); the border crossing back into the United States at the same location took 26 minutes waiting in line (in the late evening).

That was the shortest conference stay I can recall for many years, but I am glad I did make it.

This game conference takes place next week in nearby London (Ontario, not England).

One week from today will mark the start of FuturePlay 2006. This FuturePlay conference takes place in London, Ontario, Canada from Tuesday, October 10 through Thursday, October 12. Unlike last year, when it was held here in East Lansing, the conference this time is being held mid-week, albeit for the same length of time (two and a half days).

There are three official themes of this conference (according the website):

• future game development – addresses academic research and emerging industry trends in the area of game technology and game design
• future game impacts and applications – includes academic research and emerging industry trends focused on designing games for learning, for gender, for serious purposes, and to impact society
• future game talent – is designed to provide a number of industry and academic perspectives on the knowledge, skills, and attitude it takes to excel in the games industry

To get a feel for the content of the conference, one can read my (5) blog postings from last October: FuturePlay 2005, Day One, Day Two, Day Three, and Conclusion.

Honestly, I was not actually planning to attend the conference this year, despite it being fairly close. It is only a 3 hour drive from here, but with an international border crossing, that could potentially double the travel time. However, I was asked to participate on a FuturePlay panel about business issues involved in running a game development company, so I will be making the trek into Canada. Fortunately, our panel is not until Wednesday afternoon, so any delays in Sarnia should not be a factor. (Any delays are usually coming back, anyway.)

The panel is Video Game Development Business Essentials and is described as follows:

“Do you have that entrepreneurial spirit? Do you have a great game idea that you would like to develop and bring to market but don’t know how to get started? The importance of a well organized business cannot be overemphasized as a key to success in today’s video game industry. As such, this panel of veteran video game development entrepreneurs will discuss many of the issues in starting and running a game development business including among other topics: ways to organize the company, how to develop a successful management structure, seeking government and private funding, how to hire the right talent to make your game, and how to market your game so the world knows about it. Attendees to this discussion will walk away with a greater understanding of the importance of a proper business structure to the success of their individual projects.”

My fellow panelists will be Dr. Ricardo Rademacher, founder of Futur-E-Scape and moderator for the panel, Gjon Camaj, Vice President of Image Space, developers of F1 Challenge ’99-’02, and Matt Toschlog, President of Reactor Zero and programmer of Descent. I will be representing the micro-ISV perspective on game development. I look forward to meeting Gjon (pronounced “John”) and seeing Ricardo and Matt again. It looks like it will be a great panel.

There are several other presentations, as well as the keynotes, that I look forward to hearing, and I will try to document the conference on this blog (daily, even, assuming the hotel has an internet connection and the parties end early). Anybody within the sound of my blog and not too far from London should consider attending.

If you do attend FuturePlay 2006, please introduce yourself.

By the way, Thanksgiving is next Monday, the day before the conference, in Canada. Appropriately, the spellchecker is trying to replace all instances of “FuturePlay” with “Butterball”.

It has been 2.5 months since the date of my last post…

Lots has been happening in my life, both personal and professionally, since the Shareware Industry Conference ended in mid-July. It took me way too long to transcribe my SIC 2006 Diary, but here are links to these previous blog entries:

• SIC 2006 Diary, Day Zero
• SIC 2006 Diary, Day One
• SIC 2006 Diary, Day Two
• SIC 2006 Diary, Day Three

To quickly conclude the conference trip… Sunday morning breakfast; other hotel guests stealing conference food and drink. SIAF award for Pretty Good MahJongg at 14110 feet above sea level (top of Pike’s Peak); climbing at Devil’s Playground; cooked brakes requiring mandatory 30 minute rest. Hotel stay in Lamar, Colorado; poor choice, whole town smells like fertilizer. Stop for lunch in Hutchinson, Kansas; thermostat reads 112 degrees Fahrenheit. Dinner at The Machine Shed in Olathe (Kansas City); excellent food, highly recommended. Stay at hotel in Kearney, Missouri; cow statues do not stink. Early morning stop at Locust Creek Covered Bridge, built in 1868; very peaceful. Midday visit to (old) Goodsol Development World Headquarters in Springfield, Illinois, followed by lunch at historical Cozy Dog nearby. Arrival back home at SophSoft Tuesday evening. Work on backlog ensues.

During the conference, I gave a presentation entitled, Practical Interface Guidelines: Things they did not teach us in programming class. As promised you can now download my PowerPoint file here: PracticalInterfaceGuidelines.ppt [97K] (or pig.zip [18K]).

For your convenience, here are links to each of the items on the Resources page of the presentation:

• About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper (“Father of Visual Basic”)
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Windows User Experience Guidelines
• Association of Shareware Professionals
• [this] Gamecraft blog

Please feel free to link to this entry and comment on the contents.

This is the last full day of the conference (this year).

I began the morning with a small breakfast (which is still more than usual for me), but the highlight was definitely not the food. Sherry and I sat with Michael “Doc” Callahan (Dr. File Finder) and several others, and a discussion of the SIAF awards started, providing a bit of a preview to Doc’s session later in the day. With the victory of shareware marketing, the majority of packaged software products having an evaluation version available, there is some question about what actually constitutes a “shareware company” and who should be eligible for the awards. As we did at breakfast, I will leave the final commentary until later.

With my presentation behind me, I was relaxed and able to attend whichever sessions appealed to me. For the first hour, I sat in Learning From Experience: From Programmer to Business Person. This was simply a panel of three successful professionals, Gary Elfring of Elfring Soft Fonts, Jerry Medlin of Medlin Accounting, and Ed Trujillo of Contact Plus, who each talked about business considerations in this industry, as well as some pitfalls to avoid. It was good to hear how these established developers face similar issues and learn about some of the decisions, and mistakes, they had made. This was definitely a worthwhile session.

We were actually going to skip the next session to socialize/network. One session sounded pretty dry: Differences and particularities of Distribution and Re-sellers Agreements in the European Union member states. Fortunately, I happened to be standing next to that room and noticed that session had been cancelled in favor of a relatively impromptu session entitled (I think), Networking 2.0, a sequel to a kind of communication workshop I enjoyed last year. It was presented (again) by Ronny Karl of SurfWare Labs and (for the first time) by Sharon Housley of NotePage. Of course, Ronny called on Phil Schnyder (of askSam), his copresenter from last year, to provide a truly impromptu story to illustrate a point, and that provided much amusement.

The opposite session, under the general category of “Different Approaches to Shareware”, was How to make Money from the 90%+ of Users who don’t pay for Shareware, and it was, ironically, the most discussed session of the conference. Alastair Rampell (of Rampell Software) presented a method whereby customers could “pay” for software by clicking on offers from other companies, who in turn kick back a referral fee to the publisher. Personally, I am not convinced that this is a positive or sustainable business model, but there were lots of developers who apparently were. In fact, I heard that several pointed questions got Alastair to admit that he was planning to offer a service in the future. [Note: The new venture, TrialPay, has since been announced and is currently in beta.]

The official lunch on Saturday was the ESC Luncheon, hosted (of course) by the Educational Software Cooperative, which Sherry attended. The ESC is traditionally less ambitious than the ASP in scheduling luncheon activities, and there was not much to report, except that the award for Outstanding Achievement in Educational Software was given to Harry Keller of ParaComp, and the People’s Choice Award for Best Educational Software went to Dick Bryant of Open Window Software for his WinFlash Educator product.

Meanwhile, I took the children offsite to have lunch, where were joined Patrick Bailey of 10×13 Software and his fiancee, enjoying the conversation right through most of the next session. Oh, well…

The next session I attended was the aforementioned, The SIAF Awards, led by Doc. This was not so much a presentation as a lively group discussion about the awards. Doc talked a while about the history of the awards and how they have changed over the years, and then he mentioned some of the complaints he has heard and changes that have been requested. There were some categories that will probably be axed for next year due to limited participation or, in the case of the .NET awards, a somewhat arbitrary division. Unfortunately, indications are that Best Action/Arcade Game will likely disappear, but the nomination of Unreal Tournament (released in 1999, last updated in 2004) indicated that at least some people were not taking this category seriously.

The most significant issue, really, was whether or not huge companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Google should be allowed to win “shareware” awards, and likewise, whether freeware should qualify. There was some suggestion that the number of awards should be limited, but with Pretty Good Solitaire having won six times in the past, and being nominated again this year, I was not an unbiased participant. The bottom line is that shareware authors nominate/vote for the SIAF awards, so shareware authors must take responsibility for the results. It sounded like that was the common consensuss (though Doc always has the final say).

For the final session of the conference, I attended Develop for Windows Vista with Project Glidepath, presented by Michael Lehman of Microsoft. He had been promising a big announcement, which was Project Glidepath, a program for micro-ISVs that provides guidance in developing and shipping products using three of Microsoft’s key technologies, Microsoft Vista, Visual Studio 2005, and .NET Framework 3.0. It was a very interesting initiative, for which I applaud him, and it was good to hear. Of course, we have not yet chosen to whole-heartedly support any of these Microsoft products yet, so our participation is still in question.

There was a break before the main evening event, the 2006 Shareware Industry Awards Banquet. Traditionally, attendees spend this time to get prepared for the banquet, and then at the scheduled start of said banquet, everybody lounges around outside the hall (many partaking of the cash bar) for between 30 minutes and an hour before the doors are opened and the guests can seat themselves. When everybody is seated, the meals are served and, toward the end of the meal service, an entertainer performs. This year, the entertainment was magician/comedian Gayle Becwar, who was definitely amusing to watch, picking on friends
and acquaintances in the audience. (My son, William, got to pick a magic card.)

After the entertainment, and a short intermission, the award presentations began. Our game, Pretty Good Solitaire, was nominated for an SIAF award in the Best Non-Action Game category. WE WON! Because Thomas Warfield was unable to make the trip to Denver this year, I went on stage to receive the award, where I was, on Tom’s behalf, able to thank his wife, the artist, and myself. In the moment, I forgot to thank Martha Seward of Freelance Works, who does submissions and ongoing marketing for the product, so I am doing that publicly right here.

When the banquet ended, I deposited the beautiful award safely in my hotel room and returned to the lobby, where the usual crew had gathered for a dessert run. Somebody had suggested “pie” for a change of pace, but the selected establishment had apparently ceased to be. Therefore, we proceeded undeterred to Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, the site of the gathering on the previous evening. Sherry joined the party for this final evening, and a good time was had by all, as we talked until the lights went out, literally.

It had been a very enjoyable day, and an excellent way to end the conference.

This is the “hump day” of the conference, and the day of my presentation.

The breakfast this morning was not omelets, so I mostly reverted to my standard operating procedure (i.e., no breakfast). I was running a little later than normal, so the socializing with friends and colleagues was minimal, though I was able to chat with Ellen Craw of Bits du Jour, a unique marketing concept that is getting some national media attention. This site offers a special discount on one product each weekday, providing value to customers and an effective marketing channel for software vendors. Check it out!

Upon looking at the schedule for Friday, I actually did not see many that I just had to attend, so that combined nicely with the fact that I still needed to finish my presentation. Fortunately, SophSoft had another attendee at the conference, too, so we were covered, though there was nothing earth-shattering to report. I spent the morning in my hotel room transferring my notes into PowerPoint (somewhat awkwardly).

For lunch, the ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals) Luncheon was scheduled. I found the food to be decent, especially for something that had to be explained to me, but that opinion was not widely shared. My wife and I sat at a table with many ASP officials, and the company and conversation were enjoyable. The highlight of the luncheon was the induction into the ASP Hall of Fame for Rob Rosenberger, of Vmyths.com, and Kent Briggs, of Briggs Softworks. Volunteers for the ASP were also recognized with certificates; mine says “Voice of the ASP”, a reference not to marketing but to sheer volume. [Note: Audio recordings of the ASP luncheon are now available online.]

After the ASP luncheon, I again returned to working on my laptop in isolation, timing and editing my presentation (to be shorter, as usual). I emerged once to make use of the wireless internet available to SIC attendees in the hospitality area. It was there that I talked for a while with Christopher Williamson of DreamQuest Software and was shortly thereafter introduced to Barbara Hernandez of TechSmith, with whom I would be sharing the session later. Ironically, we both live in the same city, but we had to travel more than 1200 miles to meet.

The Good News was that I did manage to get my presentation finished, with time to spare (helped no doubt by having to lose material). I thought that the bad news was that I missed a session that would have been nice to attend. However, the real Bad News came when I went upstairs to my hotel room on the 9th floor to get my laptop/presentation, only to find that my key card had stopped working. Fortunately, it just took some extra elevator travel to get everything fixed in time for the session. The problem was, of course, a software bug.

With my heart racing, whether because of the scare, the additional exercise, or stagefright I am not sure, I arrived at the riser in the bigger of the two presentation rooms with enough time to test the video hardware before the session began. Fortunately, everything worked as expected (though the wireless mouse did not transmit far enough to reliably advance screens from the floor).

Barbara Hernandez gave her presentation first: Designing the User Experience: User Centered Design and the Software Development Cycle. Fortunately, despite minimal advance coordination between us, our topics were complimentary, rather than redundant. The focus of Barbara’s talk was the process involved in designing and, most importantly, testing user interfaces for customer usability. She spoke about how the process was applied to SnagIt 8, which was slightly ironic given that I was the programmer for SnagIt 2.1 more than a dozen years ago. I had to acknowledge that her PowerPoint garnered all of the style points.

My presentation was entitled, Practical Interface Guidelines: Things they did not teach us in programming class. As the (porcine) name suggests, I presented a large number of practical issues that should be considered when designing, implementing, and testing user interfaces. I deliberately went through the suggestions fairly quickly, in a successful attempt to keep within my time. We were finished with both talks with five minutes to spare for questions. At first, there were no questions at all, so I filled some time with one of the stories I had omitted earlier, and then we took a few questions that developed in the audience.

After my presentation came the reviews, the first (and worst) of which was from my wife and business partner. She felt that I could have done better with my speaking style (specifically, fewer “um”s). In retrospect, it is probably that she knows me so well that she can perceive my (otherwise masked) nervousness. I quickly sought an unbiased opinion from another programmer who I knew was in my target audience, and he said that he had not noticed, and that the talk was good. I got several spontaneous compliments throughout the evening, including from one person who suggested that the lack of questions was due to the audience still processing the large quantity of actionable information.

The activity for the evening was Exhibit Night, where attendees can visit booths of show vendors, as well as eat and drink (not necessarily in that order). Actually, the SIAF Board strongly encourages attendees to visit every booth by having a drawing for some nice portable music hardware; to enter the drawing, one needs to have ones “passport” stamped at each location. It seems to work well, as the event is always busy, even a little crowded. In addition to the SIAF giveaway, the DRM companies, the download sites, and the Digital River juggernaut, the ASP has a booth with regular (valuable) giveaways throughout the evening.

It was a great night for goodies. Several of the vendors had T-shirts, which some of us gratefully add to our wardrobe (and, yes, we do wear them). My son won a “goody bag” from the ASP, containing free copies of some member software and discounts on marketing services, fairly early in the evening. Of the three grand prizes from the SIAF, Sherry won one of the two 30GB Creative Zen Vision MP3/video players, the other going to the Thornton family, of Thornsoft, who also later won an iPod from one of the download sites. Our luck continued, too, as I personally won a copy of Borland Developer Studio 2006 Professional from the ASP ($1090 retail, courtesy of Borland).

After the exhibits closed down and we had all dumped our SWAG in our hotel rooms, we went on another late night ice cream run. This tim
e, though, Eric Issacson (ZIPKEY) had found a local store, Bonnie Brae Ice Cream, which in my opinion was far better than a chain joint. Most of the previous crew went, and we added Loren and Kim Brewer of Shareware Solutions. We did feel a little guilty that we had to leave without Mitchell Vincent of K Software, who had to disassemble the ASP display, but we enjoyed the ice cream nonetheless.

With my presentation behind me, I was able to relax and watch Monk on television before dozing off.

Today is the first official day of the Shareware Industry Conference.

The morning started out as usual with an excellent breakfast provided by the conference. In this case, it was omelets made to order, which has been my favorite breakfast meal for every SIC I have attended. This is my sixth year attending, having gone to my first in 2000 in Tampa, recognized as the most luxurious SIC due to venture capital spending by adware companies (all now defunct), and missing 2001 (the first of two in St. Louis).

My first order of business was to find the supposed speakers meeting at 8:30am, about which I was informed by Paris Karahalios (Speaker Coordinator) the previous evening. At the prescribed time, but having no set location, I dutifully checked each room and found no meeting, nor any signs suggesting one. I then saw Paris in the registration room (obviously not in any meeting), so I found a table with a few friends who I knew were also speaking, figuring that we could make or miss a meeting together. None of us saw anything, so I am still not sure whether Paris may have simply been pulling my leg.

I got involved in a conversation with a couple of friends I know, only to realize that they had not met each other in person, despite having actually worked together online. Such is the nature of our business that it is possible to work with somebody but never actually meet. The great value of this conference is the ability to interact with associates and online friends and acquaintances on a more personal level (though the presentations are valuable as well).

As usual, the conversation lasted past the start of the first session. We attended Building the Automatic Software Company Machine, by Brian Leach of Steelray Software. It was interesting but perhaps not directly applicable to our company at the moment. There was discussion of a “depth chart” that had two (or more) people who could handle any task, which immediately showed that Steelray is a significantly larger company than we are.

For the second session, I attended the User Interface talks given by Sue Pichotta of icons-icons and Becky Lash of Epic Trends. Sue and Becky both discussed the new Microsoft Vista interface, which was certainly interesting. While I have a beta copy of Vista, it refused to install on my one (and so far, only) attempt, so it was my first look. Some of the seemingly arbitrary changes to Vista are directly contradictory to advice I would be giving in my talk.

After the session, it was time for lunch. Though there was no official event planned, there was a lunch at a nearby restaurant/pub for AISIP (Association of Independent Software Industry Professionals), which my wife, Sherry, and I both attended. In a reflection of the previous session, our host was Sue Pichotta, and Becky Lash sat at our table, along with Dave Collins of Shareware Promotions, who had also already spoken at the conference (and would do again). We had a great conversation about family, marriage, and all sort of issues not directly related to shareware marketing, but probably near the core of why we all work for ourselves.

I skipped the next session to get more work done on my upcoming presentation. Did I mention that I had never created a PowerPoint presentation before? I spent much of the hour getting the structure and outline for the talk down in data form, but I was filling in some of the content from my notes before leaving the hotel room.

The next session was Reviewing and Critiquing Attendee Web Sites, which I attended to get ideas as I plan a company wide rebuilding of our (more than a dozen) web sites. When the reviewers, Sharon Housley of NotePage, Ben Weintraub of Merit Software, and the aforementioned Dave Collins, asked for business cards, there were not too many takers at first, so I threw in mine (for the main SophSoft site). Eventually, many people volunteered but, alas, my site was one of the few selected for review above more worthy sites (and by that I mean those actually selling product). Sharon served as primary reviewer on my site, and suffice it to say, the review was not favorable. (If the 1980s are mentioned in relation to a web site, when the first web page did not even exist until 1990, that is bad.)

Instead of attending the final session of the day, the family went on a short ride to the store to pick up a few missing essentials to make the rest of the stay more enjoyable.

The event for the evening was a reception hosted by Digital River, which always tries to have some sort of spectacle. This year, there were motorized toilets racing around within inflatable track walls. (Last year, it was a mechanical bull.) The food was decent, and there was free beer; in fact, DR representatives tried to hand a bottle to my 17 year old son on the way in. Unfortunately, as with previous years, there was loud music for the theme, and as soon as it looked like people were actually having conversations, the volume was turned up louder seemingly to drown it out. They could really take a lesson from Protexis, who sponsored the networking event the previous evening.

A shareware gathering tradition continued when a small group of us, led by the fearless Eric Isaacson of ZIPKEY and Eric Isaacson Software, went out for ice cream. This evening, we went to a Cold Stone Creamery that we found last year, in lieu of a proper local store. We were joined by Brandon and Rebekah Staggs of SwordSearcher, Gary Elfring of Elfring Soft Fonts, Jerry Medlin of Medlin Accounting, Becky Lash (again of Epic Trends), and my two sons. (Tip: Since the group size is always limited by seating, having a car, as I did, is the best way to assure an invitation.)

It was a good first full day of the conference, but I am definitely looking forward to some sleep.