technojunk.net

A colleague Rob discovered Google Coop - those clever folks at Google now let you create your own private search engine, restricted to search your own set of sites.

We created a search engine for our project, and loaded it up with all the Javadocs, HowTos, reference documentation and examples from all of the open-source libraries we use on a daily basis. It’s become a real time-saver, as you have exactly the right versions of all your framework and tool docs in one handy place, linked to off our project wiki. Nice!

A good practice in any project is to showcase working software to your stakeholders every iteration. It’s even more important when developing a product, as the feedback and discussion on the features you have implemented really does drive out what to implement next.

Recently we were looking around for a tool that we could use to record one of our showcases as a Flash demo. Not only does it give stakeholders who missed the meeting an opportunity to see what was demoed, it also gives us a record of how our software evolved every iteration. Nice for posterity.

We used Wink, a freeware tutorial and presentation creation program. It’s a truly superb piece of software that allows you to capture a windows session, annotate it with labels and back/next buttons and then render the whole lot as a Flash movie. It’s extremely easy to use - we put together several Flash demos that showcased different features of our product in just a few hours. Excellent!