We’re getting soooo close to our Wonderfile beta launch….

An old salty dog programmer (also very successful money-wise) once told me. “A software application isn’t really done until it’s been rewritten from scratch at least five times.”

We’re on our fourth rewrite of Wonderfile. It doesn’t encapsulate our complete vision for the app, but we feel that it’s quite useful as it is, and definitely good enough to publically beta test.

What is Wonderfile? It is a completely new way to think about organizing electronic files. We’re done with the nested folders of the 80’s and have created a hierarchical tag-based framework for managing files. This is really different stuff - a paradigm shift. Comments from experienced IT pros we’ve shown early demos to…

* “Why hasn’t anyone else done this?”

* “I can use this in a ton of different ways.”

* “How can I invest?”

We’ll be posting the access code for our limited beta on this blog October 15th. We’ll let 250 testers in to the system - first come first serve. They’ll be given privileged account status (i.e. less expensive after the test is over) and will be able to influence future development of the system.

For a sneak preview, come see us demo Wonderfile to our peers at Minnedemo Oct. 11 (free beer for the first 200 attendees). Minnedemo is held at O’Gara’s in St. Paul - the demo’s start at 7:30 and we’re the fourth company on stage…

Visit - http://minnedemo.org to register.

I spent a good hour or so yesterday battling a particularly nasty bug. Well, it wasn’t really a bug, just a curiosity that took me on a wild goose chase through several hundred lines of source code. I found a comment in my source from a couple months ago that said “trivial” and nothing more, between an if block and an else block. I thought it meant that the following code (the else block) was trivial, and seriously wondered why, since the code in the else block was actually not trivial at all.

Well, it finally dawned on me–I put “trivial” in the source code to force subversion to recognize a new version of the file I was working on. Trivial meant that the commit was trivial, not the code. Very very frustrating. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my biggest complaints about PHP5 is that you can’t do genuine object overloading, you can only fake it using the __call() method and its brethren. The crappy part about __call() is that if you want to do anything complex, you end up reinventing the wheel in a big if, elseif… else block, or maybe a switch statement. It’s not well suited for real overloading, Java style. We’re better off just using func_get_args() at the top of a method and choosing different paths based on what we find in the function arguments. But that too can get overwhelming. I thought of a solution which I find interesting. I’m not saying it’s right, or even a good idea, but it comes as close to real overloading as anything, is quick enough to use, and demands strict variable typing. Read the rest of this entry »